aella_irene | Reading

Because there was good word of mouth from various friends and trusty reviewers, I decided to give the latest Star Trek show a go, have now marathoned the six episodes released so far, and can report that word of mouth was correct: this latest installment, which is set in the 31rd century last seen in Star Trek: Discovery, shows none of the weaknesses of the third season of ST: SNW and is actually really good. Mind you, watching the first three episodes I thought, okay, they're good, not not groundbreaking, and some of the reactions made me expect more, but then came episodes 3 - 6 . building on the previous ones and fleshing out more characters, and I went "wow!" myself. And also "awwwww" at certain points. More beneath the spoiler cut.

The reason why I wasn't wowed by the first three in the way I was by the later three is that they included some clichés I never much cared for, such as a Marine, err, Starfleet instructor yelling "give me 100 pushups" . And the only school/school prank war I enjoyed fictionally was Das fliegende Klassenzimmer by Erich Kästner, plus I thought, really, do we need more mean Vulcans. These nitpicks aside (and the prank war did have its plusses as well), the first three episodes do a solid job in introducing the premise, the setting, and some of the main characters. They also showed versatality in format: the pilot episode has more action while the second episode is a classic ST ethical dilemma with lots of debate type of episode (and not the last one of the first six), and the third episode while having some serious character stuff mainly goes for broad comedy. Which is all fine, and confidence-building, but with episode 4, the show simply becomes more than that as we get our first hardcore (previously supporting) character episode which simultanously is an ethical dilemma episode and adds to the overall Star Trek lore because it tells us how the Klingons fared post Burn, something Disco did not. Now after a quiet spotlight on supporting character episode I expected the next to revert back to ensemble or main character format, but no! We got another " (different) supporting character in the spotlight" episode - which also doubled as an unabashed love declaration to one Benjamin Sisko in particular and DS9 in general. Which was great, because while other more recent ST shows did include some nods to DS9, it never got as much love as TOS and TNG did from the new kids on the block. Until now. And it was especially lovely to see because it did nostalgia right instead of going ST: Picard season 3, sigh, or follow ST:STNW's increasing tendency to become ST: TOS in its cast. Instead, it did a Star Trek: Prodigy. By which I mean: The love for the "old" characters as strong and great - but it was used in service of character fleshing out and growth of the new characters of the new show. Complimenting them, instead of replacing them. Homage, instead of a rerun. It was great. And then episode 6 went for a taut space thriller while also using what we learned so far about the characters and sharpening the profile of who seems to be the season's main villain. (And it took me until this episode to finally recall where I had heard the voice before. It was John Adams, I mean Paul Giametti!)

One more general observation: As a Discovery fan, I was delighted to see Admiral Vance again in most of the episodes, being his calm and responsible self, ditto for Jett Reno snarkng and being dead-pan as ever, and a bit surprised that Mary Wiseman has yet to make an appearance because I thought she was supposed to be a regular. Speaking of Discovery, its last two seasons feature a supporting guest star, Laira Rillak, who has both Bajoran and Cardassian heritage, and I thought that was great and that by the 31st Centuy, there ought to be a lot more "hybrids" of spacefaring nations with centuries of interaction . Starfleet Academy thought so, too, and we got indeed not just another hybrid in the regular cast but also several others popping up. And I really like the sheer number of middle-aged women we get in addition to the kids. Oh, and evidently the return to Discovery territory also meant the return to featured queer relationships. Excellent.

( Now onto more spoilery territory with comments on the individiual characters and their development so far. )

In conclusion: it's a really good first season so far! May it continue to be!

Current Mood: enthralled
Current Location: Munich

I went into Lessons in Magic and Disaster somewhat trepidatiously due to the degree to which her YA novel Victories Greater Than Death did not work for me. The good news: I do think Lessons in Magic and Disaster is MUCH better than Victories Greater Than Death and actually does some things remarkably well. The bad news: other elements did continue to drive me up a wall ....

Lessons in Magic and Disaster centers on the relationship between Jamie, a trans PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on 18th-century women writers at a [fictional] small Boston college, and her mother Serena, an abrasive lesbian lawyer who has been sunk deep in depression since her partner died a few years back and her career simultaneously blew up completely.

Jamie does small-scale lower-m magic -- little rituals to make things go a little better in her life, that usually seem to work, as long as she doesn't think about them too hard -- and the book starts when she takes the unprecedented-for-her step of telling her mother about the magic as a sort of mother-daughter bonding ritual to see if her mother can use it to help herself get less depressed! Unfortunately Serena is not looking for a little gentle self-help woo-woo; she would like to UNFUCK her life AND the world in SIGNIFICANT ways that go way beyond what Jamie has ever done with magic and also start blowing back on Jamie in ways that eventually threaten not only Jamie and Serena's relationship but also Jamie's marriage, Jamie's career, and Serena's life.

Serena is an extremely specific, well-observed character, and Serena and Jamie's relationship feels real and messy and complicated in ways that even the book's tendency towards therapy-speak couldn't actually ruin for me, because yeah, okay, I do think Jamie would sometimes talk like an annoying tumblr post, that's just part of the characterization and it doesn't actually fix everything and sometimes even hurts. But the book's strengths -- that it's grounded very much in a world and a community and a type of people that Charlie Jane Anders clearly knows really well and can paint extremely vividly -- are also its weaknesses, in that it's also constantly slipping into ... I guess I'd call it a kind of lazy-progressive writing? The book is full of these sharp, vivid, messy moments whenever it's focused on this particular relationship and Serena in specific, and without that flashpoint, the messiness vanishes. Jamie goes into her grad school classroom and thinks about how the white men are always so annoying but the queer and bipoc students Always pick up what she's putting down. Jamie's partner Ro sets down boundaries in their marriage after a magic incident goes wrong and they are Always right and Jamie is Always humble and respectful about it, because respecting boundaries is Always the Correct thing to do. (Ro is the sort of person who says things like "this is bringing back a lot of trauma for me" while Jamie's mother is actively, in that moment, on the verge of death. I'm all for honesty in relationships but maybe you could give it a minute?)

I don't know. I think there is quite a good book in here, but I also think that good book is kind of fighting its way a little bit to get out from under the conviction that We Progressive Right-Thinking People In The Year 2025 Know What Righteous Behavior Looks Like. You know. But sometimes it does indeed succeed!

I did really enjoy the book's hyper-local Cambridge setting. Yeah, I see you name-checking those favorite restaurants, and yes, I have been to them and they are pretty good. Also, as a b-plot, Jamie is uncovering some lesbian literary drama in her dissertation that gives Charlie Jane Anders a chance to play around with 18thc pastiche and write RPF about Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Charlotte Clarke and sure, fine, I didn't know very much about any of those people and she has very successfully made me want to know more! There were a bunch of times she'd drop something int he book and I'd be like "that's SO unsubtle as pastiche" and then I'd look it up and it was just a real thing that had happened or been published, so point again to Charlie Jane Anders.

My poem "The Principle of the Thing" has been accepted by Weird Fiction Quarterly. It is the ghost poem I wrote last spring for Werner Heisenberg: 2025 finally called it out. 2026 hasn't yet rendered it démodé.

Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:

If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."

it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.

The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.

Current Music: Clairo, "Bags"

CanCon, for the uninitiated in the ways of Canadian media, is Canadian Content, a percentage of which is mandated in Canada in much the same way Animaniacs used to have edutainment chunks, and for much the same reason -- the betterment of the public.

Noncon CanCon is when you're trying to avoid all mentions of That Show and it still crosses your social media feeds.

Dubcon CanCon is when it's Hudson Williams doing a photoshoot.

I am not going to throw a CanCon Consent Fest because I feel obligated to read everything people submit for fests I run and a) I don't wanna have to read fic for the gay hockey show and b) Noncon generally moves me in the direction of the back button. But if someone else throws a fest, I will write dubcon for at least two of my Canadian fandoms.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: Dubcon dubstep -- when someone is listening without headphones

Picking up a book called Part Time Girl about a high school kid who switches (physically, magically, inconveniently) back and forth between Being A Boy and Being A Girl, I was like, okay, I know pretty much what the vibes of this are going to be. And the first couple chapters in which protagonist Michael/Kayla worries about a Sort Of Girlfriend and a Hot Boy and I Have Taken This Part Time Job As A Girl But Now I Need Girl Clothes, Bra Shopping! So Stressful!! did not really lead me to think anything different!

Then about 40% of the way through the book our protagonist was suddenly running through the woods from evil wizards, and I'm like, okay, this I did not expect.

It turns out the plot of this book is NOT high school drama and figuring out your complicated gender feelings! The plot of this book is that evil racist homophobic wealthy wizards called the Clan (yes) run the world and you have to team up with your traumatized neighbor to fight them, while also figuring out your complicated gender feelings along the way.

Also, the protagonist and the traumatized neighbor bond by hanging out and watching the 2014 kdrama Healer, the plot and cast of which is lovingly described in text. This is in fact plot relevant because they later use their arguments over which cast member is hotter to prove their identities to each other when it's in question. Now I do love Healer but given that it came out, again, in 2014 and I haven't heard anyone talk about it pop culturally in more than a decade, this possibly surprised me even more than the evil wizards.

I can confidently say that at no point did I predict some of the major turns this book took, and I will put them under a spoiler in case you, too, would like to experience this Experience as I confidently believe it was meant to be Experienced: ( here we go! for the ride! )

Stolen in Death

3/5. A nice entry that returns to the intimate murder mystery format, with a throwback (and hopefully a permanent conclusion) to an old storyline about Roarke’s past. There’s been something a bit tying-off-loose-ends feeling about the last few books. I mean . . . reasonable.

Mind Games

3/5. Standalone about the woman with largely undefined psychic powers who becomes mentally linked with the man who murdered her parents; also, a romance with a former rock star. This one is okay, by virtue of having only a soupcon of paranormal. She can’t handle any more than that. I will say, her general, IDK, emotional investment in prisons was on full display here. She’s just really, really interested in prison being absolutely and unlivably terrible, and wants you to know about that in the sort of sensual, loving detail she otherwise reserves for descriptions of home renovations. I have tried to unsee how deeply invested in this she is, but I can’t, and it honestly creeps/grosses me out in every book now.

Content notes: Murder, animal harm, the psychic equivalent of internet spamming someone and telling them to kill themselves.

Our next book will be This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart. We'll start in two weeks' time, on 24 February, and posts will be weekly.

I've just picked it up on Kobo for £2.99, which isn't bad.

Hope to see you there!

So I read the fourth book in this series (by accident, not realizing it was the fourth) a couple of years ago, and stalled out on book 1. After reading the SCP Foundation book last week, I decided there would never be a better time for a cosmic horror-comedy book I already owned - and I was so right, I marathoned the entire series this past week and absolutely loved it. There's a new book coming out in 2026 and I cannot WAIT.

These books, and especially the first half of book 1 (by far the weakest part of the series), are dudebro-ish and sometimes very early-2000s deliberately transgressive humor (i.e. South Park - this gets MUCH less as it goes on, but never really goes away), and they are sometimes lovely and insightful, and sometimes just incredibly stupid, and I can see why someone would bounce off them, especially considering how I struggled to get through the early parts of book 1. But after four books, I love these characters so much that I will follow them anywhere. Even through the stupid parts!

These books, especially the first one, are primarily narrated by Dave, a slacker dudebro in the general style of early 2000s movies etc (this is very clearly in the style of the Kevin Smith movies, South Park, and other things of that era). Dave is a depressed loner working at a video store whose best and only friend is John, a Bad Idea Friend who takes every drug he gets his hands on, belongs to a shitty band, and drags Dave into a never-ending series of terrible, terrible life choices.

The plot-relevant one of these is taking a new drug sweeping their depressed Midwestern town of [Undisclosed], a drug which looks like mobile and intelligent used motor oil. It turns out that it kills most of the people who take it, but they are among the few survivors, and are suddenly able to step outside time and space, and see everything going on their small depressed Midwestern town -- all the ghosts, all the cosmic entities. They can uncontrollably travel in time, they can freeze time, and they're swept up in an attempt to fix a series of goddawful cosmic horror rifts in time and space that are wrecking their whole dimension.

The third member of the group is drawn in during the first book when she becomes a victim and later a friend: Amy, who was shattered physically and emotionally in a car accident, and then comes to the attention of cosmic horrors; starts off as one of the people they're trying to help, and gets sucked into weird spacetime shenanigans with things that she (unlike John and Dave) can't actually see. It's with Amy's introduction that the first book feels like it really kicks off and gets good.

The body count is high and gory, there are tons of gore and grossout humor and some incredibly soft, emotional and deeply affecting moments as well. This is a series where

some spoilers for one of the books

the big dilemma can be how do we kill some giant extradimensional maggots that pretend to be adorable human children, who everyone else sees as adorable human children, while they munch gorily on their caregivers and no one else can see it ... or maybe it's the realization that the hideous maggots are also children, deserving of care and consideration as any other children, and maybe the people you need to stop are the government agents coming to kill them.

If whether the dog dies is an important factor in your reading or viewing, please click

this spoiler

there is a dog, and the dog dies.

These books are so hard to rec, because you have to slog through the worst part of the series (the first half of book 1) to get to the almost transcendentally good late middle of book one; it can be lovely enough to make me cry or just spectacularly stupid within a chapter or two. A lot of stuff is brought up and then never explained. But sometimes the explanations made me put the book down and have feelings for a while. It made me laugh a lot. There are so many bodily fluids and terrible bodily function jokes. Some of its best moments involve the characters being forced to contend with the fact that life is complicated and stupid and cruel, and the best thing you can do, maybe the only thing you can do, is to simply be kind, and make the kind choice, if that's the only choice you have to make.

Sometimes defeating the apocalypse cultists means sitting down with them and understanding their heartbreaking loneliness and convincing them to walk away because you can be the person who turns them around and becomes the only person in their lives to ever believe in them and tell them that they can be something better than this.

... And sometimes it involves a triple-barreled shotgun and a plan involving a room full of fake silicon butts. That's what this series is like.

( A spoiler from book 4 )

Today's excitements included a more complicated dentist's appointment than originally envisioned and having to stop very suddenly short on I-93, but I did technically find my way to Scollay Square.

Current Music: Rose Betts, "Come Away"

Hi, all -

The winners are:

Mary Stewart - This Rough Magic (shewhostaples - first)
MM Kaye - Death in the Andamans (aka Night on the Island) (themis1 - second)
Madeleine Brent - Tregaron's Daughter (wychwood - third)
Charlotte Armstrong - The Chocolate Cobweb (coughingbear - fourth)

shewhostaples,

themis1, and

coughingbear - what book would you like to pick? And what order would you prefer? I know

coughingbear said not the next one.

I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.

( And be the roots that make the tree. )

spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.

Current Music: Rose Betts, "Running"

This week: All right! As a preface to Josephus Book Club, I am just reading the preface this week and we will do a bigger chunk starting this next week (see below). The preface is just a few pages long (I'm reading up until what in Oxford is paragraph 30, "All of these contents are set forth in seven books... I shall now begin my narrative as indicated at the start of my summary.")

I'm sure you all will have deeper things to say than I do about this, but wow I am just amused by how Josephus just starts out pulling no punches about how annoying and inferior he thinks the other historians are. (The footnote to The historians of this war fall into two categories... hearsay... or distort the facts namechecks Justus, who featured prominently as a frenemy in Feuchtwanger's Josephus trilogy.) I do like his logic in saying, hey, if you want to make the Romans look good, why make the Jewish side look feeble? Also his logic in saying, hey, actually, it makes more sense to be writing contemporary accounts for which one has eyewitnesses, as opposed to writing about ancient history "as if the ancient historians had failed to give their own accounts sufficient finesse," lol. (Although I guess that is what academic historians do!)

Titus Caesar is also namechecked, lookin' good.

The footnotes also say that historiographical writers generally claimed impartiality, so Josephus talking about his personal feelings of sorrow here is atypical, which I thought was interesting.

In fact, looking over the whole sweep of history, I would say that the sufferings of the Jews have been greater than those of any other nation -- and no foreign power is to blame. Oooooof. I guess that's a good tagline to pique interest in the book, though...

(I'm really glad I read Feuchtwanger's Josephus books first to orient myself, though!)

Next week: We'll start Book 1!

selenak advised that we read up to Herod the Great's killing his favorite wife. My Oxford edition has "verse"/paragraph numbers but not chapter numbers as selenak's has, but I think (selenak, please let me know if this is incorrect) in my edition the idea is to read up to paragraph 443/444: Maddened by unbridled jealousy, Herod ordered the immediate execution of them both. Remorse quickly followed rage: his anger subsided, and his love was rekindled. The heat of his desire for her was so intense that he could not believe she was dead...

WELL ALL RIGHT THEN. I can see we have lots of sensationalistic gossip ahead of us!

thistleingrey mentioned that it was a solid depiction of academia and characters in academia, which immediately piqued my interest. I have read Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis and enjoyed it, and I know Hazelwood is in academia, but I sometimes thought... well, let's just say that it's a romance between a grad student and the young hotshot professor in her department, and... okay... that part... is totally realistic actually... but I feel like I kind of got stuck a lot in all my feelings about the potential deep pitfalls. Hypothesis was also, I think, much more concerned with primarily being a romance novel and secondarily a novel about academia.

Anyway, this is unabashedly a romance novel, complete with marriage-of-convenience and sometimes even the one-bed trope, but without any particular kinks like professor/student :P But the thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it's at least as interested in both the experiences of the precariat (*) and also familial relationships as it is in the romance itself. In fact, it does not have a conventional romantic Act 3; here the Act 3, as well as the understandable but frustrating misunderstandings that prolong it, is passed squarely on to the familial relationships rather than the romantic ones. Which I personally really like!

The two main characters, Jonah and Sadie, are adorably academics. (**) I laughed out loud when Jonah said, "I'm all for radically revised gender roles in the heteronormative institution of marriage, but I should still pay for my wife's engagement ring," if only because I've never heard anyone else talk that way in a romance novel -- though if you have, please rec it to me. (Their engagement is the aforementioned engagement-of-convenience and the ring is $27.99, I hasten to append, and she pays for his ring.) (lol, I think I actually paid for my engagement ring, because it was an important transaction involving me and an important piece of jewelry -- what?)

Anyway, I rarely like romance novels, but I liked this one!

(*) I did not know the term precariat: the precarious proletariat, that insecure class of unstable work and low wages -- but I was familiar at least by reputation with the academic pre-tenure-track life that the term describes, in the sense that it is one of the many reasons why I did not pursue academia

(**) Jonah likes using footnotes; I guess your mileage may vary but I found it adorable, perhaps inevitably

By sheer coincidence, I ended up reading Alix Harrow's The Everlasting almost immediately after The Isle in the Silver Sea. Both books are ringing changes on the same big themes -- the narratives of nationalism, fate and tragedy, Spenser and Malory, depressed lady knights and evil girlbosses -- and from what I had previously read of both Harrow and Suri's work I was tbh quite surprised to find myself liking The Everlasting a bit better.

The premise of The Everlasting: it's more or less the second-world equivalent of the 1920s and we have just had a Big War. Our protagonist Owen has a radical pacifist alcoholic father that he doesn't respect, a war medal that he didn't really earn, a academic career that doesn't seem to be going places, and a face that makes it pretty obvious that at least one parent came from The Other Side. However, his messy relationship with the war has not in any way altered his ardent passion for the greatest figure of his country's nationalist mythology, the knight Una Everlasting, who fought at the side of the nation's founding queen a thousand years ago and died tragically to bring the country stability.

Then he finds a book that purports to be the True History of Una Everlasting, and gets summoned to a secret meeting with the country's minister of war, an evil girlboss who immediately sends him back in time to experience and document Una Everlasting's Last Quest first hand. He gets to write the nationalist myth himself! What fun!

Alas, it turns out that the great knight Una Everlasting is violent, brutal, and extremely burned out about all the people she's killed as part of the bloody process of nation-forging: at this point the citizens think of her as a butcher and she's inclined to agree. Nonetheless, fanboy Owen convinces her to take on this one last quest for the sake of her honor & kingdom & legacy &cetera, with the promise of peace at the end of it, knowing full well that the end of the quest will in fact mean her death.

This is the first section of the book and tbh I enjoyed it enormously. Owen is writing the narrative in first person and his voice is used to great effect: he's a twisted-up and self-contradictory character who shows the problems of nationalism much better as a guy who's genuinely trying to convince himself that he believes in it than he would if he started out already enlightened. I love his embarrassing radical pacifist dad and his judgmental thesis advisor, and, as heterosexualities go, I am absolutely not immune to the allure of large violent depressed woman/weaselly little worm man whom she could easily break in two who is obsessed with her but also fundamentally betraying her. If the book had ended at the end of its first section, I think it would have been a phenomenal standalone novella.

However, the book does keep going. I continued to have a good time, more or less, but the more it went on the more I felt that it had sort of overplayed its hand. Alix Harrow is extremely a Power of Fiction author in ways that didn't fully work for me in the other book of hers I read; I do appreciate that this book is the Power of Fiction [derogatory] but I still think that perhaps she is giving fiction a little too much power ... For the length of ninety pages I was willing to role with the importance of The Great Nationalist Myth, but the longer it went on and the deeper and more recursive it got with its timeloops the more I was like 'wait .... we only have one founding myth? changing the myth really directly and immediately impacts the future in predictable and manipulable ways and is in fact the only thing that does so? Hmm. Well."

Also I enjoyed the evil girlboss right up until it was revealed that every evil girlboss in the country's whole thousand-year-old history had been the very self-same evil girlboss and no other woman had ever done anything. You are telling me you have built up a whole thing about this country's founding myth of the Queen And Her Lady Knight from scratch and that didn't change the country's relationship to gender at all? NO other woman was ever inspired to do anything with that? I am not sure that's as feminist as you think it is ...

Anyway, I do think this book and The Island In the Silver Sea form a sort of spiritual duology and I'm glad to have read them back to back: for such similar books they have really interestingly different flaws and virtues.

Virtually ethical (500 words) by Petra
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker
Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi
Additional Tags: Tragedy, Quintuple Drabble, Hurt No Comfort
Summary:

Obi-Wan is usually pretty good about listening to what Anakin is saying, but not always.

*

Blastin' and laughin' so long (750 words) by Petra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo, Lando Calrissian/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo, Chewbacca & Han Solo
Characters: Han Solo, Chewbacca (Star Wars), Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Lando Calrissian
Additional Tags: Crack Treated Seriously, Han Solo Shoots First, Humor, In-Universe Meme
Summary:

How "Han Shot First" came to be a meme in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Current Mood: giggly
Current Music: My God, how the kudos roll in

I am really torn about this one. On the one hand, all the downsides I assumed when first hearing about this and when watching the trailer turned out not to be the case. On the other hand, something I hadn't expected did happen - two somethings, actually - and both to my favourite character from the original, and I'm still massively annoyed about this.

What I thought/feared: because The Night Manager had been such a success, they'd simply go for the (unnecessary) repeat sequel formula, with Jonathan Pine motivated by personal loss and vengeance (again), and the two new characters, arms dealer Teddy Santos, as a Richard Roper copy, and the sole woman focused on in the trailer, Roxana, in the role of beautiful girlfriend of the villain falling in love with our hero. This turned out not to be the case, though the first episode seemed to indicate it would be, with just enough differences to make it entertaining. Then more episodes happened, and I sat up and thought: Oh. Oh. That....is actually a really clever twist on the formula. Or several. But also, come episode 3, the first of the two things happened. And, well, I can't talk about this without spoilers....

( Spoilers think that if the original version was more optimistic than Le Carré's novel, this sequel decided to go all in with the cynism (though not nihilism) )

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Bamberg

In a generally unsurprising plot twist, all three of the Babylon 5 vids in this year's Festivids were by me. I haven't gotten around to properly reposting them to my signed vid account, but for now the signed vids are uploaded to the anonymous account and they can also be downloaded by clicking through to Vimeo as an interim measure until I get them properly posted for download.

I also added them to my Sholio Vids collection.

Some random notes on this year's vidding under the cut.

( Talking a lot about Babylon 5 )

Festivids reveals have SNUCK up on me they are happening TOMORROW and I have NOT had time to watch all the things I wanted to watch but! here are some things I very much liked anyway!

First, my own three (3!!!) beautiful vids:

Sharp Dressed Man, for Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born, a glorious celebration of Theatrical Fashion

Touch, for the film Phantom, tense & wistful lesbian tragic romance!

and Ready to Fight, also for Phantom, TRIUMPHANT KINETIC ACTION

I did not expect to receive vids for either of these sources and they are all beautiful and perfect to me!!

And now, an incomplete list of other vids I really really liked and/or was impressed by and/or laughed my ass off at:

who wants to live forever (17776: What Football Will Look Like In The Future)

Congratulations, You Survived Your Suicide (Disco Elysium)

Everything I Need and PC Dyke (Dykes To Watch Out For)

nothing and everything (Hamlet) (the SONG CHOICE)

The Man I Knew (Jesus Christ Superstar)

Here (Labyrinth) (THE SONG CHOICE!!!)

ASSHOLE (Looney Tunes)

Let's Get This Over With (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

Ya Ya (Sinners)

There Is No Ship (Steerswoman)

man (Victor/Victoria)

I hope some of you enjoy some of these as much as I did!

It has been snowing lightly and steadily since I woke this morning. Those five hours of sleep were the most I have gotten in a seven-day week. At the moment a sort of bleach-silvered effect has started around the overcast sun: it seems to make the west-facing windows across the street reflect mercury-green. There were sunshowers in the snowfall, but not while I was out walking.

( I caught the stone that you threw. )

I can tell that my ability to think in media is reviving because in twenty-six years it had never occurred to me to fancast Stefan Fabbre and all of a sudden I thought that, fair-haired, dry-voiced, the moody, unsteady one in the family, in 1976 he would have been in Clive Francis' wheelhouse.

gwynnega has suggested that Millard Lampell deserves his own Library of America volume and I'd order it in a hot second.

Current Music: Rose Betts, "I Am an Island"

Okay, lovely, wonderful and everything BUT:( Read more... )

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Aella

January 2015

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selenak - Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1.01. - 1.06
skygiants - (no subject)
sovay - Can you see me? I'm waiting for the right time
petra - CanCon in the age of Heated Rivalry
skygiants - (no subject)
lightreads - JD Robb/Nora Roberts
shewhostaples in girlmeetstrouble - Next book: This Rough Magic (Mary Stewart)
sholio - John Dies at the End - Jason Pargin (series)
sovay - There's nothing here but echoes
wychwood in girlmeetstrouble - poll winners
sovay - If I'm hoping, then I'm hoping for the frost
cahn - The Jewish War: Preface
cahn - An Academic Affair (McAlister)
skygiants - (no subject)
petra - Star Wars stories - Virtually ethical - Obi-Wan/Anakin drabblex5 & Blastin' & laughin' so long - Han
selenak - The Night Manager (Season 2)
sholio - Festivids vidder reveals and vid nattering
skygiants - (no subject)
sovay - There's no boat to take me where all the stars go to cross the water
mekare in spacefungusparty - FINALE

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Page generated Feb. 13th, 2026 08:37 pm

Or the mad descendents of a writer's pen?

Reading

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1.01. - 1.06

(no subject)

Can you see me? I'm waiting for the right time

CanCon in the age of Heated Rivalry

(no subject)

JD Robb/Nora Roberts

Next book: This Rough Magic (Mary Stewart)

John Dies at the End - Jason Pargin (series)

There's nothing here but echoes

poll winners

If I'm hoping, then I'm hoping for the frost

The Jewish War: Preface

An Academic Affair (McAlister)

(no subject)

Star Wars stories - Virtually ethical - Obi-Wan/Anakin drabblex5 & Blastin' & laughin' so long - Han

The Night Manager (Season 2)

Festivids vidder reveals and vid nattering

(no subject)

There's no boat to take me where all the stars go to cross the water

FINALE

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January 2015

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