primeideal | Reading

I've barely scratched the surface of the massive MCYT AUfest Battleship works bounty, but I'll be leaving for a week-long vacation with my gf at my grandparents' tomorrow so here's part 1 of recs. 11x fic, 1x webweave, 3x comics/art; a wild mix of AUs and genres and pairings, mostly for Hermitcraft, some Life Series, DSMP, QSMP.

( 11x fic, 1x webweave, 3x art )

atamascolily

I read three of Seishi Yokomizo's translated works - The Honjin Murders, Death on Gokumon Island, The Inugami Clan. Thus far, I'd describe his style as "murder as a performance" - in each of these books, the murderers spend a great deal of time and effort staging the bodies as a way to "show off" to the audience and the other characters. This is true for other mystery writers, I think, but it's especially prominent here, and Yokomizo's culprits often have a sense of "fair play" in terms of their relationship to the detective; on some level, they want to be caught, I think, even when it's not conscious. Yokomizo is also keenly aware of Western detective conventions (explicitly discussing them in the first book) and responding to them, although he gets way less self-conscious about it after the first book. Anyway, it's a very different vibe from the Nero Wolfe novels, to say the least.

I would also say that The Honjin Murders very much has "first novel" vibes, and Yokomizo gets more comfortable as a writer and with the premise as he goes along. He is also not great with female characters, and has his own biases and stereotypes, but this is not unique, alas.

The cover art for the Pushkin Vertigo editions is memorable and striking, and includes character glossaries, all of which I appreciate. They've published at least two other translations, but I don't know if I'll be able to get a hold of them without taking additional steps. (Worldcat revamped their catalogue so you can't see what libraries hold what without making an account, and it's so irritating, ugh.)

Also apparently Seishi Yokomizo is a character in Bungou Stray Dogs, which makes him effectively unsearchable on tumblr without having to sort through pages and pages of his anime namesake. There is also a Steam game based on The Honjin Murders, although I don't think I have the capacity to play it right now until I get a new computer, which is true for most games at the moment.

On the Nero Wolfe front, I read Gambit, which is ostensibly about chess (but really isn't) and In the Best Families, which unexpectedly broke with the usual formula. One of the hazards of reading a long-running series out of order is that I missed the earlier books in the Arnold Zeck continuity, but he's basically the Moriarty to Wolfe's Holmes, so I figured it out pretty quickly.

cahn

E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!

This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )

I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...

seekingferret

Bad Shabbos

Jews do not dance in this movie.

But it was nonetheless an incredible movie and I loved it so much and I laughed all the way through.

The film is a farce in the vein of a Neil Simon play- a modern Orthodox Upper West Side family prepares for a Shabbos dinner made fraught by the fact that the Catholic parents of the son's fiancee (who is in the process of converting) are visiting from Wisconsin. This process becomes a lot more complicated when a dead body, that the family has to conceal, turns up.

I love a precise farce and this is an incredibly well composed one that manages to squeeze multiple jokes out of every setpiece through callbacks and reaction shots and brilliant use of the limited set. The whole audience was constantly laughing for the entire movie.

I especially loved the incredible Talmud jokes, which testified to a writing team that not only is familiar with the text of the Talmud but also its vibes. I still laugh every time I think of the challah.

And I loved that it is a movie about a family sticking together through thick and thin. I remember complaining about This Is Where I Leave You that for all the funny moments the inescapable truth at the end is that this family doesn't like each other very much, and I found that deflated my enjoyment a lot. In this movie, for all the family dysfunction and disagreement, when things go down they team up to be dysfunctional together.

schneefink

The main gameplay phase of

mcytblraufest Battleship is over. Team Nether! *raises fist in triumph* We finished third (out of five teams), and we fully cleared all three boards, before work reveals even. I had such a great time on my team, with our two strider mascots Dirk Slow and Aragorn Steady. Massive props to the mods, everything ran very smoothly. In the first board every field had very cool flavor text even, and the bosses were very cool (we defeated the Wither Storm!)

I ended up with ten (!!!) gifts!
And I'm proud to say that despite that I reached my semi-serious goal of creating more gifts than I received. ~~Though if I get more treats after this I'll give up.~~ I've never received so many comments on one day as I did yesterday, it was great.

My wonderful gifts:
Sharp teeth and spring rain, Hermitcraft SMP
3.4k, Mumbo & Etho, fantasy AU, platonic kink
Summary: That anticipation, now cooled, mingled with fresh dread as the blank, flat space on the horizon tore open.
A thousand-year old dragon emerged from the void and blocked out the sun with his wings.
Mumbo gulped.
“Oh, Gem!” he fretted. “You expect me to dom that?”
Why I love it: Excellent premise, very cool worldbuilding, great character voices and development of their relationship.

Careful People, Hermitcraft SMP
1.3k, Cleo/Etho, cyberpunk AU post-divorce
Summary: "We'll be careful," says Etho.
"We're not careful people," Cleo reminds him.
"Maybe we know better now!"
Why I love it: I love the banter. Them. So divorced and yet.

( seven more shorter ones and one piece of art under the cut because this got long )

The three weeks of the event were very intense. Multifandom Battleship starts soon and I don't think I'll sign up for it even though I had a great time last year, but that'd be a bit too much. ~~Unless...~~

And now, off to read more from the collections! All Ages and 18 Plus, almost 1.200 works in total already, and there are still almost two weeks of the anon period.

neotoma

Brown sugar kettle corn, a quart of strawberries, a pint of blueberries, 2 pints of black raspberries, 3 cups of saskatoons, 2 quarts of sour cherries, a half-pint of black currants, almond croissant, bacon-gruyere wheel, lemon tart, and then I picked up my friend's CSA share as they and their spouse are out of town for the weekend and got: garlic scapes, bunching onions, sugar snap peas, mini romaine (broken romaine leaves in a plastic bag), red leaf lettuce, kale, and red beets.

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: This Is Who You Are (Trans-Siberian Orchestra)

I tragically can't find the post again, but a few days ago, I ran over one of the most perfect AOS Kirk vs TOS Kirk summations I've seen on Tumblr, re: Pride. I'm extemporizing because I don't remember the phrasing at all, but the overall tenor was:

Okay, the difference between them is not that one Kirk is bi and the other isn't, they are both extremely bi. But if AOS Kirk was at Pride, he'd be wearing a slutty crop top while in the actual parade, and goes out drinking to the local gay bar after it's over. TOS Kirk supportively goes to the parade, gets a headache an hour in, and leaves to watch an all-male Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet.

And truly, I'm not sure I've read a better analysis to date :P

cahn

I have now read the Hugo novel nominees, where by "read" I mean "DNF'd two of them" -- Ministry of Time, Service Model, Alien Clay, Tainted Cup, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (I read in this order).

In the reverse order of how much I liked them:

The Tainted Cup (Bennett) - 4/5 - this book is set in an Empire continually threatened by giant leviathans every year, and in which they have discovered how to do all kinds of biological manipulations. Dinios "Din" Kol is an engraver, a person who has been biologically modified to have a perfect memory; he works for the brilliant investigator Anagosa "Ana" Dolabra, who has her own set of personal idiosyncracies. As the book starts, Din is investigating a murder, but the murder rapidly expands to involve a larger set of deaths and a larger set of power structures within the Empire.

ase pointed out that of all the nominees this is in some ways the most traditional-Hugo one (concentrating heavily on worldbuilding and plot) and yeah, I am That Traditional Hugo Voter. I loved this book, which first of all had a great premise, but also I felt had a precision and detail that I really enjoy in both the worldbuilding and the murder mystery. All the clues were right there (some were more obvious than others), and I even picked up a few of them, although not enough of them that I really had any idea what was going on (I would have had to pay a lot better attention, for one thing). The worldbuilding is really detailed and interesting to me, and the mystery is one that is centered right in the worldbuilding in a lot of different ways, which I find really cool.

I also have as a long-standing complaint about media in general that whenever there's an unequal partnership, the person in the position of intellectual power, the chess-player who is the mover and placer of the pawn(s) on the boards, is always a man -- though the other person in the partnership may be a woman. And I was charmed to see that reversed here, with Ana being the mover and placer.

I could imagine someone not loving this book because Ana and Din do work within the structures of an Empire that is pretty clearly extremely imperfect and rife with corruption, even if Ana does give a rousing speech about how her duty is to try to root out the corruption. I do think that some of how I feel about it will depend on further books in the series and how they deal with that. But either way, I very much appreciated the complexity of how many if not all the characters turn out to be various shades of gray; the "good" characters are still working in a corrupted system, and at the same time, one can usually understand why the "bad" characters do the bad things that they do, often as reactions to that same system.

Major spoilers

I also kind of loved that the solution to the mystery turned on bureaucracy and also on a giant money-making scheme. That's so... plausible.

I loved this one enough that I'm immediately picking up the next one at the library. Which other Bennetts should I read? I started City of Stairs but never got very far -- but maybe I should have forged onward a bit more?

The Ministry of Time (Bradley) - 3+/5 - In which various people are brought through time to a near-future Britain and are acclimatized to modern life by living with a government-admin "bridge" -- most particularly Graham Gore, a nineteenth-century Arctic explorer, and his bridge, the unnamed narrator, who is a woman with a British father and Cambodian mother. Meanwhile, there are attacks that appear to be related to the time traveling...

I was confused while reading this book for a long time. The author seemed to have a pretty clear idea on how Gore's mind would have worked, historically speaking, which meant I had no idea why anything was set up the way it was -- why is Gore's bridge a mixed-race woman, why are they living alone together in a house, none of this makes sense -- until the romance started, and then I finished the book and read the afterwards, and ohhhhh, okay, it started life as a fanfic, and all of that was basically the setup to get the ship together, yeah, I get it now, I have written that fic too where the justification for throwing the ship together made, uh, minimal sense. (To be fair, there are some plot-relevant justifications for the setup of the Ministry that only get revealed near the end, and I thought that part was neat.)

All this being said, if one accepts the implausible setup, everything else that followed was interesting, and I did find the book compelling enough that I was eager to read it all the way through. I definitely liked it more than the average Hugo finalist this time out!

Service Model (Tchaikovsky) - 3/5 - A robot butler puts himself out of work and goes on a road trip, occasionally accompanied, to try to find humans to give him more work. It was fine and quite readable (Charles, as the robot butler starts out being called, is a reasonably engaging POV), although I felt like it could probably have been wrapped up in a novella or even novelette -- I felt like the road trip went on and on without adding very much value, and then suddenly all the plot (which I enjoyed!) happened in like the last five percent. One of those angry books about how terrible modern society and human beings are. It's not that I disagree, it's just that it is a bit wearisome to read a whole book about it.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In (Wiswell) - DNF - a tale told from the POV of the monster Shesheshen, who likes to eat humans. This wasn't a bad book, it would probably have gotten at least a 3/5 if I'd finished it, but I made the mistake of not tackling it until after having read The Tainted Cup. Nest just doesn't have that kind of complexity at all, by which I mostly mean the characters. (I also don't think the worldbuilding and plot is nearly as complex and interesting either, but I didn't read far enough for those things to bother me as much.) In Nest, there are definitely Bad characters whose only function is to be so over-the-top obnoxious that we cheer when Shesheshen eats them. I also was annoyed by the character-worldbuilding in which Shesheshen knows just enough about humans to be able to be all self-righteous about how annoying and hypocritical humans are. (Monsters, as far as I can tell, are totally great. Like, they eat their parent and siblings and all, but that's cool, that's just the way they are.) Idk, maybe I was brought up on too much Tiptree, I would have liked her to be a little more, well, alien than to be able to discourse on humans being hypocritical (which to my mind presupposes a reasonably sophisticated understanding of human behavior). But yeah, I should have read it around the same time as Service Model, I would have been able to finish it then.

Alien Clay (Tchaikovsky) - DNF - I can't even make it through the first chapter, I am not sure why. There's something about the narrative voice that I just really am having a hard time getting past.

Hugo novels: Tainted Cup > Sorceress > Ministry of Time > Service Model > Nest > Alien Clay

seekingferret

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

There has to be a word for the literary technique where you have a section of the book that doesn't work- it's boring, or unsatisfying, or implausible, or mis-paced- but its presence makes a later part of the book land harder. Part IV of Some Desperate Glory doesn't work for me- it asks you to suddenly find empathy for characters it hasn't invested time in developing, it rushes to the action scene and then works through the action scene in a way that is inconsistent with the rest of the book. But then you get back to the characters you care about in Part V and everything is amplified and hits so fucking hard, because of Part IV. It's an incredible ending and a really neat structural achievement.

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Rosanna (TOTO)

Continuing from J's and my re-watch (for me, after a good 20 years) of The Motion Picture:

So, uh, well, I finished it, though my overall feeling is “what the fuck did I just see?” I feel like this conversation J and I had afterwards sort of illustrates our general mood:

J: Even by Star Trek standards, this was incredibly horny in a very 70s way. I’m pretty sure the entire female reproductive system was cosmically represented.

me: RIGHT? So many labia and yonic tunnels and barely metaphorical orgasms and uhhh

J: Many clits also.

me: SO MANY.

J: Though I think the Voyager craft was the, you know, main one.

me: …maybe Voyager was the real clit all along?

Despite this, Spock’s navigation of the horny cosmic feminine is the gayest shit ever, including him icily referring to the various uhhh openings in the tunnels as “orifices” and one of the shippiest scenes with Kirk he’s ever had (a high bar for them!!).

( Read more... )

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Hit Me With Your Best Shot (Pat Benatar)

35 minutes into watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

We’ve heard the full theme suite twice (at least).
Spock, for unknown reasons, has regressed all character development and is back to pursuing “pure logic” and cultural acceptance, but like in every episode of TOS, is still facing constant microaggressions.
Don’t like the Vulcan lady immediately invading his mind with barely a word of warning and no choice in the matter on his end. Very “the life of Spock in dealings with women,” in fairness.
Something in me hates the idea of Kirk as an admiral, but I have the comfort of knowing that Kirk hates it, too.
The aesthetic is glossier but much less vibrant (much much less vibrant—“bright green uniforms looking like gold” is not nearly as annoying as just going with beige).
McCoy has a mountain man beard and has been forcibly unretired, but comes across as very him thus far.
The annoying Decker from TOS now has a more annoying son [ETA 6/19/2025: or brother, I guess, since I gather we're expected to believe this is only a few years after the five-year mission and some details don't make a lot of sense if as much time has passed as had IRL] who just got demoted because Kirk, a literal admiral, has far more experience with this particular kind of problem and they’re facing an existential threat.
Black women get to have natural hair!
Shout out to the many competent background characters (especially the base who died getting as much data out as possible).
San Francisco and Vulcan look fantastic!
Random obligatory hot lady responds to Kirk effectively saying “hi” with “I’m celibate” and he’s like “o…kay, how about you just do your job” which is, in fairness, a very TOS Kirk response to weird sexual stuff from women.

isis

What I recently abandoned reading:

I got just over halfway through Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao before deciding that YA mecha is not my thing, even when it's a YA mecha AU of Chinese history. I think I'd rather read an actual historical novel or even nonfiction about Wu Zetian, who seems to have been an impressive-as-hell woman. (I will take recommendations!)

What I'm reading now:

Lamentation, the 6th Shardlake book by C. J. Sansom. (An actual historical novel! 😁)

What I recently finished watching:

S2 of Andor, which as I said, weirdly ironic to be watching as we grapple with our own ascendant Evil Empire. The pacing of this season was strange, big time-skips and characters that had seemed important in S1 (or in early episodes of S2) disappearing completely, or reappearing briefly only to be killed. I was expecting more about Mon Mothma's family, after all the screentime lavished on the wedding and her sort-of-blackmail situation. I was also expecting more of a resolution, though that's probably because I only vaguely remember Rogue One, so a lot of the breadcrumbs were, "wait, who was that again?" instead of, "aha!" for me. But I liked Kleya a whole lot, and also the snarky ex-Empire droid, and some of the spycraft bits were fun.

What I'm watching now:

We are giving American Primeval a try, despite it probably being on the violent/gory side for our tastes. We're two episodes in, and - I immediately recognized Shorty Bowlegs from the most recent season of Dark Winds! (Derek Hinkey, playing Red Feather.) Also, there is a local(ish) woman in it, Nanabah Grace from Cortez just down the road, who plays Kuttaambo'i. An article about her in the local newspaper was the way I first heard of this series, actually.

I'm enjoying the historical stuff; it's set during the Mormon War, which I actually researched a bit for my Yuletide fic, the premise of which was that the main reason that Deseret became an independent republic in the alt-history of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz was that President Buchanan backed down in the face of united Mormons and natives, as both religion and respect for the tribes were stronger in that universe's US. I also like seeing the Old West, even though it was all filmed in New Mexico pretending to be Wyoming, although I'm getting a bit tired of the washed-out sepia filter.

What I recently finished playing:

Okay, not quite finished, but I have completed the last major quest in Mass Effect: Andromeda, so it's basically over. (I mean, the credits rolled! Therefore, it's over!) I know that Andromeda is considered ME's poor stepchild, but - I really enjoyed it. The "major threat to the world as we know it!!1!!one!" of the main trilogy is such a staple plotline of video games like this that I appreciated the "survive, explore, and (hopefully) thrive in a NEW UNIVERSE (and also defeat the major threat to the world as we know it)" plotline for its novelty. I thought the structure of quests opening new planets and objectives in a rough but not strict order worked well, and I really liked that most (maybe all?) decisions are not hugely critical, so you don't doom yourself to a bad ending by choosing X instead of Y. I did check the wiki a few times when I was nervous about things, but pretty much none of these decisions made any real difference, which meant I was free to actually role-play as "what WOULD (me as) Sara Ryder do?" and I find that much more relaxing.

I wasn't quite completionist - I didn't do all the fetch quest type quests, and I didn't do one vault (Elaaden, which I might go back and do), but I did pretty much everything else. I liked the glyph puzzles, and I hated the Architects, ugh. I played mostly as what in the main trilogy would be Infiltrator (combat + tech). I romanced Liam (after a fling with Peebee). It was fun!

What I'm playing next:

I think I will try some shorter games; I got Lorelei and the Laser Eyes a while back because a friend recommended it, and Skabma - Snowfall from a recent deal, because it looked pretty. I might try Baldur's Gate 3 again - I never managed to get into it and found it frustrating and annoying. Eventually I plan to get Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and also probably Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I've heard good things about.
(Or sell me on your favorite adventure game!)

atamascolily

Continuing to plow my way through Nero Wolfe novels wildly out of order: Fer-de-Lance, A Family Affair, Too Many Clients, Might As Well Be Dead, The Final Deduction, Murder by the Book, Three Witnesses. I don't understand how they decided what to put in the omnibus editions--Fer-de-Lance (1934) was in the same volume as novels from the 1950s, why?--but I'm grateful because it's helping me complete the set.

Incredible how Rex Stout just pantses his way through every time; it makes it tremendously difficult to guess the answer in advance when not even the author has a clue at the beginning (although it's significantly easier in the shorter works due to space constraints). Why do I even bother researching how to construct mysteries from scratch for casefic when I could just be making it up as I go along??

The other fun thing about Stout's corpus (apt choice of words for Nero Wolfe) is that you can see how technology and culture marches on, yet the core elements constant throughout. I jumped from the Depression to Nixon (you can tell Stout loathed Nixon) and yet somehow Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe are still detecting in real time over a 40 year period. The same thing happened with Sherlock Holmes, going from gaslamps to the eve of World War I, but it's still fascinating. Fer-de-Lance has a lot of Early Installment Weirdness, though, which makes sense, since it was the first book and Stout was still figuring out the formula; once he did, he churned them out with remarkable alacrity.

But lest you think I have done nothing but follow hard-boiled New York detectives for the last month, I've also branched out to Seishi Yokomizo, a 20th century Japanese writer who specialized in period mysteries, since I was able to find some of his stuff in English. Suffice to say it's a very different vibe but some things are still the same.

(I am probably going to end up writing a casefic soon, and so all of this is grist for the mill. But also, as I think I've mentioned before, I'm weirdly fascinated by mysteries as a genre, not so much for their contents, but their structure and characters.)

Also reading Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which is non-fiction, but a) extremely funny, and b) explains so much about why the Terra Ignota series is Like That, actually. Highly recommended.

(it almost makes me want to re-read the Terra Ignota books again, but I'm not sure I can handle that right now - I have such a love/hate relationship with the series because on the one hand the premise is right up my ally but it also means dealing with the most unreliable narrator of all time (who I loathe) and a cast where it is extremely difficult by design to decide who to root for. Which is also true of history, and Palmer's approach to it, but I handle it better when we're talking about the Borgias or Machiavelli and not fiction for some reason.)

Volume 4 of Dinosaur Sanctuary is... okay, I guess? Still frustrated by the ongoing tension between what I want this manga to be and what it actually is. Also The Summer Hikaru Died V5 ended its latest arc and it feels like we didn't accomplish much, but damn if the volume didn't have another great ending, so I guess we'll see what happens--this is a manga that nails "atmosphere" but I'm not sure about "plot". TBD.

Also reading [REDACTED] for [REDACTED] which is a big project I can't talk about for a while, if ever, but has been filling me with so many feels and revelations, so there's that.

In other news, Crunchyroll dropped the final Thunderbolt Fantasy movie with NO ANNOUNCEMENT WHATSOEVER aside from a post on its newsblog, so, uh, way to promote your own shows there. I've already written about my feelings on tumblr, and it turns out I like the movie more than I expected based on the summaries from people who saw it in theaters, BUT I still posted the fix-it fic anyway. Anyway, I have watched it about 4 times all the way through and certain individual scenes way more than that.

landofnowhere

I've been busy with non-reading stuff, mostly work and playing Blue Prince with A (but also I went to Scintillation!) But I do have some books to catch up on.

Nathan the Wise, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by William Taylor. Looking at the Goodreads reviews, it looks like everyone in Germany has to read this for school, while it's much less well-known in the US -- I only learned who Lessing was because of his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn. I knew this was Lessing's plea for toleration between the three Abrahamic religions, but a post on tumblr made me decide to actually read it. Looking at the dramatis personae and seeing that one of the characters was the adopted daughter of a Jew made me concerned about the problematic ways that plot point could go, so I went and spoiled the ending for myself to make sure it would be okay -- the final plot twists take things in a much more interesting direction than I'd been worried about from the setup. The titular character is a bit too much the voice of wisdom (as one would expect from the title) to be the most interesting, but the supporting cast is fascinating.

The Falling Tower, Meg Moseman. A theological thriller about a group of college freshmen, written by a friend of mine from college -- she conveys the college atmosphere both recognizably and warmly, and the story is very page-turn-y. It is modern feminist take on Charles Williams, the lesser-known friend of Lewis and Tolkien, whose work I have not read (The Place of the Lion, about Platonic archetypes showing up in the real world, sounds intriguing, but I also hear it is not as good as its premise), and I'm not sure if I'm more likely to now. It is doing a lot of cool and ambitious worldbuilding stuff, and lets its characters have different relationships to Christianity; the spiritual aspects of the worldbuilding certainly are compatible with Christianity without it being message-y -- this is a story in which growing up in the way that college freshman grow up is more important than finding religion. I hope more people read it so that I can discuss it!

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Only the Good Die Young (Billy Joel)

heckofabecca asked:

Hey I made a new friend who's big into Elizabethan plays and of course I was like "TIS PITY??? TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE?!?!?!" so I'm trying to find one of your posts that talks about it and I'm coming up short XD help?

I replied:

Aww, good for her!

*puts on academia hat* 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore is not Elizabethan, technically (which I only mention because it’s common even among academics to forget how late it is, and this can complicate search results). It was first written (and definitely first performed) long after Elizabeth I’s death, but it is of the general early modern era of English drama, so still worth bringing up in that context!

This ten-year-old post probably has the most to say about it (so it’s totally understandable that it was hard to find), but I have a whole tag! Not very originally, it’s here. [ETA 6/18/2025: The links go to Tumblr, since I haven't cross-posted that far back.]

I’m running off to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture with my bff J, but I can also give you some more big feelings on Elizabethan dramas later :)

ursula

North Continent Ribbon is shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin prize, along with Rakesfall, Sapling Cage, The City in Glass, and a bunch of other fascinating-looking books I haven't read yet.

I am so, so, so thrilled.

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)

Despite stumbling into passionately shipping the original Star Trek ship of ultimate destiny that spawned fandom as we know it, I've found my interests and preferences a bit at odds with general ST fandom, which naturally has meant that I had to make my own silly TOS icons reflecting what I'm personally into. I promised

elperian that I'd get around to posting them here—they're up for grabs for anyone who wants them, and I'm sick and miserable for asthma reasons, so it's something that doesn't take a lot of brain power.

1. You know the infamous scene from S3 where the terribly written alien spawns a terribly written Kirk meltdown only for it to become one of the most incredible and certainly gayest scenes in all of TOS ft. Kirk and Spock's shadows leaning in and eventually overlapping? I definitely needed that one:

2. Perhaps the most purely surprising and purely delightful revelation from the TOS watch was that Uhura doesn't do much more with Spock than hit on him a few times in some early episodes, but she and Kirk have a really charming platonic friendship where they're only ever on a last name/rank basis, yet are genuinely close and are persistently shown to care very deeply about each other. And they're also absolute joys when their subtle background rapport as mutually smooth-talking, stylish, high-strung but controlled professionals gets to flourish into what I can only describe as bisexual guile diva chaos gremlin energy. There are multiple occasions when one of them is finally starting to crumble under the pressure and the other is an absolute rock until the crisis passes (which one takes which role actually varies), but I have a real soft spot for Kirk reminding Uhura of how important and valuable she is in "Mirror, Mirror," so that's the scene I chose for my first Kirk-Uhura brotp icon:

3. The great thing about "Amok Time" is—well, there are many great things, but you know how you sometimes watch something, and you just end up kind of hating everyone and siding with a meteor destroying all concerned? "Amok Time" is the opposite of that. It's one of few episodes of anything where I'm pretty much Team Everyone, and this very much includes one of my absolute favorite Vulcans of all time and one of my favorite women in TOS, my girl T'Pring:

Yes, she did all that, and good for her, too. Spock himself talks about the prospect of having sex with her with about as much enthusiasm as a death sentence and T'Pring doesn't want to be his property/consort, so win/win. Maybe Vulcan should have better divorce laws if they don't want fantastically stylish women scheming for personal autonomy!!

4. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to have an icon for my beloved episode of episodes, "The Conscience of the King" (a fantastically acted and structured episode in general, obviously a great Kirk episode specifically, with an intense and intriguing villain in Kodos/Karidian, but also in true TOS fashion about the then-highly topical subject matter of what to do with elderly ~~Nazis~~ escaped eugenicist war criminals, an emphasis on Spock immediately recognizing the strangeness of Kirk's behavior and quickly grasping the weight of genocide for the survivors where McCoy desperately wants to filter Kirk's actions through familiar, relatable, pedestrian motives right up to the end, all interlaced with early modern revenge tragedy aka my academic specialization and other great love—truly, no episode could be more perfect for me specifically). So I went with an icon for one of my absolute favorite scenes from the whole damn thing, the magnificent confrontation between Kirk and Kodos:

"You're an actor now. What were you twenty years ago?"
"Younger, captain. Much younger."
"So was I. But I remember."

5. I really wanted a gay Spock icon that was not necessarily a Kirk/Spock icon (he is mostly Kirksexual, sure, but he's also so aggressively Not Into Women on so many occasions that I felt it deserved its own separate icon). And so many of those scenes don't really get across the level of bitchy indifference without the movement of his head tilt or shrug or whatnot... but I found one that I felt truly encapsulated the particular gay energy of Spock:

6. While I was at it, I couldn't resist the other supremely bitchy gay Spock scene (this is when Kirk invites him to join a party of dudes going to a hot lady cafe and Spock very slowly tilts his head and projects intensely passive-aggressive confusion at the idea that he could possibly find this appealing):

7. There's a post that periodically goes around about Shatner's wildly erratic positions on Kirk's sexuality over the last 50-odd years that's like... dude, you're the one who kept looking at Nimoy like you wanted to eat him, you're the one who played Kirk as the queerest dude in space, you did this, Bill, and—yeah, it's not wrong. One of the other big surprises from watching all of TOS was realizing that the intense queer vibes of K/S has every bit as much to do with Shatner's performance as Nimoy's, along with the framing and writing and so on. No other Kirk actor (and few ST actors period) has even remotely approached the off-the-charts queer energy of the original, and so I made a silly icon about it:

8. I wanted a K/S icon that captured how much of their dynamic is like—

Kirk: I'll admit that part of me seeks the blood of my enemies and every day I choose not to murder
Spock: um, I ... have questions
Kirk: well it's just - LOOK A FLOWER!!!!!!
Spock: Jim please stop sniffing flowers they keep trying to kill you

Truly, no one's doing it like them.

9. One of my other favorite Kirk-Uhura brotp moments is when he casually promotes her to the local racist's position controlling the Enterprise's weapons and navigation in the middle of the Romulan crisis in "Balance of Terror." Kirk and Uhura are visually framed together a lot in that episode and lit very similarly, so I wanted to pair Uhura confidently stepping up in that episode with his affirmation of her importance in "Mirror, Mirror":

10. I had been talking with

elperian about the hunt for Kirk icons, and we both hadn't found any that used the much-quoted description of him from the pilot as "a stack of books with legs" and his notoriety at the Academy as the demanding teacher of a course (implied to be a philosophy class) in which cadets would either "think or sink." Despite his more easy-going manner in the present, his conviction that noping out of critical thinking and creativity is not an option, ethically, remains absolutely non-negotiable and central to his worldview in TOS, so I wanted to come up with a "think or sink" icon. However, when I was collecting some screenshots from "Court Martial" for unrelated meta, one of them was so perfect for "stack of books with legs" that I couldn't resist going with that one instead!

anghraine

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: I Want to Break Free (Queen)

I enjoy headcanoning both Kirk and Spock as nonbinary in the same "technically but badly closeted" way that I interpret them as very much bi4gay—but also, as pretty different types of nonbinary. Spock describes himself as both a man and not a man (within the same episode, the iconic "Amok Time"). In many respects, he possesses the most purely unassailable masculinity of anyone in the show (this is a significant plot point in one of the Maximally Gender episodes, "Charlie X"). He wears make-up in the style of female Vulcans like T'Pring and T'Pau more than like how most men wear make-up, while surrounded by people who don't even know the difference, and at the same time, he's not at all uncomfortable with being identified as a man. To describe Spock as a man is incomplete information, not false. His "nonbinariness" consists very specifically of Man and Not-Man, and he tends to be marked by a highly consistent presentation of himself that blends gendered conventions, as suits his unique experience, but also makes him the most supremely masculine figure around when that's an issue at hand—a specific sort of bigender quality with some pretty obvious resonance with his experience as a biracial Vulcan.

Kirk, I think, doesn't consciously consider that he could be anything but a man, and is broadly okay with that, if the range of his gender performance isn't compromised by external pressures. But when he is pressured to occupy some specific gendered role, his resistance seems to go from 0 to 100 very fast. I imagine nb!Kirk as the kind of closeted-even-to-himself nonbinary person who assumes everyone's experience of gender is as tied to performance as his own, and surely, it's just obvious that it's all kind of fake outside of social dynamics, it's just that social dynamics affect people's lives and psychologies, and thus matter (the reality is more complicated, obviously, but it is a not-uncommon perspective among some kinds of nb people still figuring our shit out, cf. Judith Butler—my headcanon is that he's less bigender or multigender than "agender diva who likes to fuck around with conventions around masculinity and femininity and whatever else, but feels little allegiance to any of them as a stable state of being"). I do think that being reduced to a specific, exclusively masculine role by forces outside himself (despite being sometimes useful) pretty evidently grates on him more than the somewhat effeminate roles he sometimes gets steamrollered into (also sometimes useful), but since he's strongly implied to be AMAB, that wouldn't necessarily be unusual (assigned gender often has more baggage for obvious reasons, even if it's not more or less "wrong").

I do tend to think of him as transfem-leaning nonbinary at heart (one of my many quibbles with Tumblr TOS fanon is that I genuinely think Kirk makes 100x more sense as transfem than transmasc, and that his presentation in the peak Kirk Enrichment Enclosure episodes is far closer to femme than butch too when accounting for the limitations of the era), but the cisheteronormativity of the 23rd century is alive and well. The specifics of how he would fully express his actual sense of gender in a less restrictive world don't preoccupy him much as long as he gets to be the diva he was born to be and doesn't feel (gender-wise) like someone is actively clipping his wings. So he's just sometimes going to slip into announcing that gender is an insignificant distraction from the common personhood of all people, if a fun one, before breezing onto picking flowers or throwing himself into the occasional community theatre production or fluttering his eyelashes to escape the third trap of that week.

neotoma

Empanadas (masaco and nutellla), rosemary plant, yellow sweet cherries, tart cherries, red raspberries, black raspberries, almond croissant, bacon-and-gruyere wheel, sugar peas in pods, carrot-walnut mini-cake, chocolate raspberry mini-cake, walnut-chocolate cookies, and locally grown brown rice.

Profile

primeideal

June 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Page Summary

schneefink - June recs: MCYT Battleship 2025 part 1 (15 works)
atamascolily - end of June update
cahn - In which I read a bunch of stuff my kids told me to read
seekingferret - (no subject)
schneefink - Team Nether: so many treasures
neotoma - Farmer's Market -- 21 June 2025 (Onion Day, 3rd of Meadows, Year 233)
anghraine - Kirk vs Kirk (ft. Pride)
cahn - Hugo novels
seekingferret - (no subject)
anghraine - Tumblr crosspost (1 February 2025)
anghraine - Tumblr crosspost (1 February 2025)
isis - thursday reads and things
atamascolily - mid-June media update
landofnowhere - wednesday books are theological
anghraine - Tumblr crosspost (1 February 2025)
ursula - (no subject)
anghraine - Icons! :D
anghraine - Celebrating Pride with further nb K/S headcanon details :D
neotoma - Farmer's Market -- 14 June 2025 (Jasmine Day, 26th of Meadows, Year 233)

Style Credit

Base style: Compartmentalize by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Blue Diamonds by Musyc

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 27th, 2025 12:43 pm