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sholio) wrote2025-08-09 09:57 amMCU meme
muccamukk.Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).
( Big annotated list of movies/shows )
( Some nostalgic nattering about that )
Code if you want to do it yourself:
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-09 09:34 amRandom political thoughts
When I say "random," I mean it: My thoughts wandered from one thing to another.
I learned from one of the language bloggers who I follow on Instagram that the Chinese people have come up with a nickname for Trump: 川建国 (chuān jiàn guó), which means "Trump builds country." I'm sure if Trump is aware of this he's flattered by it, but only because he's not aware that the "country" being referenced here is China, the idea being that by making America look so bad, he's making China look much better by comparison.
Which got me to thinking that no matter what one thought about Biden, at least when he president, I didn't worry about him stumbling us into a war.
And thinking about the possibility of us ending up in a war made me think about my maternal grandfather. Like most men of his generation, he served in the military during World War II. Unlike most men of his generation, he talked about his experience, specifically to complain about what a miserable experience it was. Out of a strong desire not to get shot at, he joined the Seabees (naval construction battalions) before the army had a chance to draft him. Once he had gone through boot camp, the US Navy, in its infinite wisdom, thought it was a good idea to take a young man who had never been more than 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico and send him to Alaska to help build an airfield. And all of this was to be done:
- while wearing boots that hurt his feet (my grandfather had super-narrow feet, and the navy only issued boots in medium),
- without proper medical treatment for his migraines, and
- while being fed food that constantly upset his stomach.
Obviously it was better than getting shot, but the experience was miserable enough that he would still complain about it 40 years later. One day, my grandmother had had enough of his complaining about his military experience, and she asked him "But aren't you proud of getting to do something for your country? Wouldn't you do it again?" He thought about it for a moment, and then, in all seriousness, said "If they were coming from the west, and they made it as far as [a small river about 5 miles west of their house], I might think about it." And thinking about it now, I'm like "Same, Granddad. Same."
sholio) wrote2025-08-08 08:00 pmJust Murderbot things
I was thinking about how the adaptation for the next season might go.
( More about that )
snickfic) wrote2025-08-08 11:53 ammore new horror movies
28 Years Later (2025). 28 years after the original rage virus that turns people into mindless flesh-eating monsters, a twelve year old boy named Spike leaves his safely quarantined island community and ventures to the mainland in hopes of finding medical help for his mother.
I have heard very mixed reviews of this movie, things like "interesting but messy." I honestly find this a little confusing, because on the whole I found this movie beautifully executed (it's Danny Boyle, after), emotionally coherent, very well-acted, and with only as many unlikely bits as one gets in any zombie/post-apocalypse movie. It's very earnest; I saw someone call it "sentimental, in a good way," which feels about right. I liked the island community, I liked the complicated relationship between Spike, his mom, and his dad. The moments the movie wanted me to find beautiful and moving generally worked for me.
I didn't love it the way some of my friends did; I think it just didn't have enough of my own personal id-bait in it. I thought it was a perfectly competent post-apocalyptic coming of age story, though.
The one fly in the ointment is the ending/cliffhanger, which feels like a visit from the schlockiest era of Mad Max. It's easy enough to just ignore that scene, though, at least until the second movie in the trilogy comes out. IMO this movie works fine without it.
Together (2025). Real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie star as a longtime couple whose stagnated relationship gets more strained when they move to the countryside, and then things get really weird after they go hiking and fall into a weird hole in the ground.
I feel like this movie knows exactly what tone and mixture of horror, humor, metaphor, and relationship drama it wants and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately that tone didn't really work for me, and I found the main couple annoying, especially Franco's character. Meanwhile the movie is NOT interested in the mechanics or backstory of its horror, fair enough, but those are the parts that I would have been most interested in.
The deal with the third significant character is pretty fun, and I appreciate the foreshadowing. I also appreciate that this is yet another horror movie this year with a casual, unmarked queer relationship in it.
Overall, this felt like a perfectly fine movie that was just not for me.
Strange Harvest (2025). A true crime mockumentary about one man's series of ritualistic killings.
If "Lovecraftian serial killer mockumentary" sends tingles down your spine, then this movie is for you. I would not say it does a lot over and above that description, but the slow unspooling of events and the eventual reveals (which mean more to us horror aficionados than to the people being interviewed) are all very solidly written. It also manages to be quite gory, which I feel is impressive given it's literally all shown via photographs and video taken after the fact. There's one particularly grisly kill that is not like anything I've seen before. Plus, you have to be charmed by a movie so indie that the guy playing the serial killer is also the production designer.
Watching this, I wondered why there aren't more horror mockumentaries. They feel like probably just one step up from found footage in terms of budget and complexity (okay, maybe two steps), and they allow for a lot of the same kind of storytelling. I would absolutely watch more of this kind of thing. (Any recommendations? I've seen Lake Mungo, and that's about it.)
Anyway, this movie is a solid example of the kind of thing it is, which happens to be a thing I like. If you watch it, be sure to stick around through the end credits for the little stinger.
saiditallbefore) wrote2025-08-07 06:58 pmShips Crossing Letter
I'm sure I'll like whatever you make for me, so just have fun! I know there are some characters/pairings that have more prompts than others, but that just means I had a lot of ideas for those (or had a past letter to copy & paste from). If I requested a character, I would be happy to see just about anything for them!
I’m
( General likes and DNWs )
( Ships )
<3
rmc28) wrote2025-08-07 10:27 pmChoices choices
Work's "Active Staff" programme through the university sports centre is mostly dormant in August, but has just acquired a regular "give it a go" session for women's football on Thursday afternoons. (Hmm, I wonder what recent event might have prompted such a thing ...) Unfortunately this session clashes exactly with my favourite free exercise class, which has just rebranded from "yogalates" to "stretch and relax".
One of these activities will help my knee mobility and one of them is highly likely to mess up my knees further. Much as I want to be as tough as Lucy Bronze, I regretfully skipped the football and stuck with the stretches.
rmc28) wrote2025-08-06 10:12 pmTo-read pile, 2025, July
Books on pre-order:
- Queen Demon (Rising World 2) by Martha Wells (7 Oct 2025)
Books acquired in July:
- and read:
- Moonlighter by Sarina Bowen
- Grown Wise (Liminal Mysteries) by Celia Lake
- and unread:
- Death by Candlelight (Adam and Eve Mysteries 1) by Emma Davies
- The Little Cottage on the Hill (Little Cottage 1) by Emma Davies
Books acquired previously and read in July:
- A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine [2][Sep 2024]
Borrowed books read in July:
- Once Upon You and Me by Timothy Janovsky
- You Had Me At Happy Hour by Timothy Janovsky
- Cover Story by Mhairi McFarlane
- One-Touch Pass (SCU Hockey 4) by J.J. Mulder [8]
- The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton
- Fourth Wing (Empyrean 1) by Rebecca Yarros [2]
Rereads in July:
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine [2]
I continue to enjoy all of Celia Lake's books, and I still adore the Teixcalaan books by Arkady Martine, whether reading or listening to them. Stuart Turton wrote the entirely gripping groundhog-day country house murder mystery, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and I found The Last Murder at the End of the World another very gripping science-fictional murder mystery, this time in weird post-apocalyptic flavour.
Fourth Wing is a massive fantasy tome (21 hours of audiobook!) about a lethal military college for aspiring dragonriders, which piles a great many tropes onto some rather wonky worldbuilding. It is very entertaining and I can see why it is hugely popular. I am part way through the even more massive sequel and I regret nothing.
[1] Pre-order
[2] Audiobook
[3] Physical book
[4] Crowdfunding
[5] Goodbye read
[6] Cambridgeshire Reads/Listens
[7] FaRoFeb / FaRoCation / Bookmas / HRBC
[8] Prime Reading / Kindle Unlimited
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-05 09:25 pmWill they never stop?
Republicans continue their long string of stealing from artists who would want nothing to do with them. The Department of Homeland Security used Woodie Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" in a video..
When CNN contacted them to ask if they were aware of the song's radical origins, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a reply that read, in part, "Loving America may be a radical or foreign concept for CNN, in fact we’re quite confident it is," which can be interpreted two possible ways:
- McLaughlin is unaware of the song's radical origins, and your run-of-the-mill MAGAt being also unaware, will eat this up.
- McLaughlin is aware of the song's radical origins, but is counting on your run-of-the-mill MAGAt being unaware, in which case they'll eat this up.
Since there's no possible option in which your run-of-the-mill MAGAt is aware of the song's origins, she scores points with the MAGA base either way. Which is why I think it's important that people who actually do have two brain cells to rub together know the full lyrics of the song.
Most people just know the first two verses:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me.As I was walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway;
I saw below me that golden valley;
This land was made for you and me.
The next two verses continue in much the same vein:
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding;
This land was made for you and me.When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.
And then it turns into a protest song:
As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-05 05:37 pmBecause apparently AI needs this...
I just received the latest update on downloads of my history master's thesis on early 20th century English educational policy. To date it has been downloaded a total of 230 times. Of those, 55 were last month. I suppose it's theoretically possible that there was a major surge of interest in my topic last month, but considering that none of the downloads were from England, I wouldn't bet on it.
The top fans of my work were Brazil (12 downloads), the US (9 downloads), and Vietnam (4 downloads).
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-05 09:31 amOne of us is wrong
Either I don't understand how ebooks work, or else Yale University Press doesn't understand how ebooks work: Today, Yale University Press released Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics by Eike Exner. As you can see in the screenshot below from the Yale University Press website, the ebook version is, and I quote, "Out of Stock" on the day of release.
It seems to me that ebooks should never be out of stock, especially not on the day of release! And I'm sure that by "Out of Stock" they actually mean something like "not ready for sale" or "not available for purchase from this website," but even if that's what they mean, that's not what they said, and saying what they said makes them look stupid.
It makes me proud of high school me, because instead of choosing not to go to Yale because he couldn't afford it, he chose not to go to MIT because he couldn't afford it. 😉
ETA: You can also see in the screenshot I posted that the paper book and the ebook are the same price, which is a whole other thing that I'm not going to bother posting about again, except to say that I hate how the price relationship between paper books and ebooks is completely arbitrary. I'm sure that it's manipulated in whatever way is most profitable for the publisher, and I'm quite confident that it never (intentionally) benefits the author, no matter which way the publisher cooks the books. (pun intended)
sholio) wrote2025-08-04 05:34 pmMurderbot fandom (and books)
I've read all of the books except Network Effect and System Collapse, which tbh I .... probably won't? I did a little skimming for context, so I know what happens, at least.
( More on that, and the general state of the fandom )
snickfic) wrote2025-08-04 12:07 pmBooks
Wild Spaces (2023), SL Coney. A boy's grandfather unexpectedly moves in and disrupts the boy's contented family life; also the boy might be turning into a monster.
I hated this! Unreservedly! This has pretensions of being literary, the kind where nobody gets a proper name except the dog, and the focus is entirely on small, sad family drama seen through the eyes of someone too young to correctly interpret all the details. The fact that the grandfather eventually turns out to be a shapeshifting eldritch horror who murders the boy's parents and his dog did not make me like it any better. Then the boy, who inherited the eldritch shapeshifter gene, murders his grandfather and reflects he is now alone in the world, an inhuman monster with only a transforming revived dog for a companion. Okay!!!
Deeplight (2019), Frances Hardinge. Born and orphaned on one of hundreds of islands who used to worship sea gods until the gods all killed each other a few decades prior, youngster Hark is determined to save his friend(?) Jelt from himself, the law, criminals who are rightfully angry with him, and being transformed into something unimaginable, all whether Jelt wants to be saved or not.
On one hand, I found the toxic friendship at the center of this story pretty difficult to read. Jelt is such a manipulative asshole, and there was so many points where I just wanted to get Hark away from him. OTOH, the execution is very strong, and I think it's probably a really good theme for kids to read about and think through, so A+ there.
But really what I am here for and the reason multiple people have recced this to me is the stuff with the sea gods, and friends, that stuff is very good. The gods when they lived were all enormous, all different, all awesome and horrible in their own unique ways, and I loved everything about them and how they played into the story. Hardinge's worldbuilding never disappoints, and it's fantastic here while also tying into bigger themes that feel very salient. But mostly: fucking amazing eldritch horrors.
In terms of sheer joy the story brought to me, this is probably now my second favorite Hardinge after Cuckoo Song.
glinda) wrote2025-08-03 11:35 am
Soundtracking July
Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is a seven movement work describing an imagined journey by - and I’m just going to quote the press release here - “an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself”. Apparently inspired by the quote that “we have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in the sky”. In my research adventures looking into the origins and inspirations for the album, I read a review that described it as being like a team up between the Flaming Lips and the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, and that really does hit the nail on the head. (While last month’s album made me feel that I’d have loved it substantially more if I’d encountered it twenty years ago, this is an album that I love now and yet still dearly want to press onto my seventeen year old self because it would blow her mind.) It’s a symphony for analogue synth and brass band - Tubular Brass to give them their due - and achieves that rare thing of balancing both in a way that shows affection and respect for both elements while combining and pushing them into something greater than a sum of their parts.
As I’ve often noted in my Tectonics reviews, even when writing for orchestra, electronic and modern classical composers lean heavily on strings and percussion and often ignore the more experimental potential of the brass section - if they even know what to do with it in the first place, sometimes they miss it out entirely. One of my favourite things about Public Service Broadcasting’s oeuvre is that they know what to do with a brass section - to the extent that when they do live shows, if there’s any non-electric instruments it’s usually a bit of brass. (The do love a wee wind trio of trumpet, trombone and saxophone.) But that’s generally the exception rather than the rule, it’s rare to get something that really explores the joys of brass and syths working together to build a greater whole. It’s incredibly cinematic, music fit for wider screen vistas or a planetarium show. The electronics are dreamy and gorgeous, but it’s the beautifully layered brass that really opens us up to the scale of what’s being depicted. It’s also a piece composed by someone who loves brass band music in it’s own right, who understands how epic and transporting brass - specifically this was written for a colliery brass band rather than an orchestra section, it’s a very specific sound - can be while being at the same time such a grounding and physically solid presence. There’s a gorgeous solo - is it a flugel horn or a cornet I puzzled for ages, the reason I couldn’t identify it is became it is in fact a synth! - in the second movement - Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula - a segment that evokes both a brass band playing in a village hall, dust motes dancing in shafts of sunlight from high windows, and cinematic shots from the window of the ISS of the sun rising over the Earth amid the darkness of space. This is music for lying in the grass on a pitch black night in the middle of nowhere watching the stars wheel overhead.
The run time is just shy of thirty seven minutes, and if no-one uses it as the soundtrack to a short science-fiction film - ideally animated, perhaps heavy on the homage to both Wallace & Gromit and the works of Raymond Briggs and Oliver Postgate - then they’re missing a trick. (Now I want to use it to re-score A Grand Day Out…)
snickfic) wrote2025-08-02 02:04 pmSummer of Horror
Received:
A Small Price to Pay by
Wrote:
clean and warm and green, Stardew Valley, Willy gen, 1.6k. I love the apocalyptic vibes in the game the first time the green rain falls, and I really enjoyed taking those to a horror place here.
blood like rot, Dracula Rising (short film), Iosif/Vlad, 2k. The canon is a 10-minute animated prologue to some Dracula TV series adaptation, but the animated bit stands alone pretty well and is very pretty! In the US you can watch it on Youtube after "buying" it for $0. I picked it up in order to write this pinch hit, which is general/liege loyalty kink to the max (as is the canon, for that matter). If that's your thing, you might enjoy this.
brithistorian) wrote2025-08-01 03:19 pmBooks read, August 2025
- 1 August
- Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma, vol. 14 (Yuto Tsukuda)
- 5 August
- My Dress-up Darling, vol. 13 (Shinichi Fukuda)
- 7 August
- Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 25 (Tomohito Oda)
- 8 August
- I'm in Love with the Villainess, vol. 5 (Inori)
flareonfury) wrote2025-07-31 10:27 pmMeme: 20 Questions For Fanfic Writers
kitarella_imagines. Figured this would be great for the Fannish 50. 1. How many works do you have on AO3?
145 works (I don't think I've quite updated all my fics to AO3, so check out
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
harpiewriting for a complete list pre-2014 when I kinda stopped using LJ for the most part. I'll have to add those works to the community.) 2. What’s your total AO3 word count?
154,381 words. (Again I don't think I've quite updated all my fics to AO3, so check out
harpiewriting for a complete list pre-2014 when I kinda stopped using LJ for the most part. I'll have to add those works to the community.) 3. What fandoms do you write for?
So many.... the ones with the most works are Smallville, X-Men, Harry Potter, Fantastic Four, Supernatural, Wizards of Waverly Place, and the Arrowverse.
4. What are your top five fics by kudos?
- Daughter of Iron Man (MCU, Darcy Lewis centric) - 1176 kudos
- not so simple (broken smile) (MCU, Darcy/Bucky) - 354 kudos
- Alternate Slice Girl (Supernatural, Dean & Emma) - 246 kudos
- so I'll kiss you like I'm gonna lose you (Arrowverse, Sara/Leonard) - 230 kudos
- scent temptation (Arrowverse, Sara/Leonard) - 192 kudos
snickfic) wrote2025-07-31 07:45 pmMovies: The Amateur, Trap, The Watchers
The Amateur (2025). After his wife is killed by terrorists and his bosses at the CIA refuse to do anything about it, computer nerd Charlie (Rami Malek) sets out to get revenge on them himself.
This is by far the most movie-like of these movies. It has a solid thriller structure and decent cinematography, and most importantly it has Malek, who is fantastic. Plus, who doesn't want to to root for the underdog? On the other hand, the espionage scene in this movie has a few too many gentlemen in it: gentlemanly CIA ages, gentlemanly terrorists. By the end this tipped over from charmingly quaint to silly. It also has way too few ladies in it, by which I mean there are four total and three of them end up dead. And it was very confused about what it wanted to say with its revenge plot, with an ending I found pretty unsatisfying.
Trap (2024). Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter to a pop concert but then realizes the police are using the concert to trap a notorious serial killer, ie him. The first of my accidental Shyamalan double feature! This is directed by M. Night and features his daughter Saleka as the pop diva.
This movie is very silly. The basic premise of a psychopath trying to escape a concert without his daughter realizing anything is wrong was good fun, but most of the plot developments strain disbelief or just make no sense. Then they do actually get out of the concert venue in the third act, which means instead of the gimmicky premise the movie is having to stand entirely on the strengths of its plotting and character work, which are not up to the task. Cooper gets only the laziest of psychological development or motivation, and Hayley Mills (!!) as the FBI profiler leading the efforts to catch him is severely underused.
The worst thing about the third act, though, is that the daughter fades completely out of the picture, and we are supposed to care about first the pop diva (??) and then Cooper's wife (???) and their respective relationships/interactions with him. The wife in particular is a total curveball; she's had like two lines before she suddenly becomes the lynchpin of the final act. The pop diva, meanwhile, just can't act. And also I don't care! I thought this movie was going to be about Cooper and his daughter, what the fuck!
To me the piece of writing that typifies this movie is the FBI profiler saying towards the end that nobody could have noticed Cooper's psychopathy except maybe a parent. Meanwhile, Hartnett has spent the whole movie playing this character as only barely hinged.
The Watchers (2024). A young woman in Ireland named Mina agrees to drive a parrot to a neighboring city, gets lost in a wood of cosmic horrors, and ends up joining a group of other survivors trapped in a structure where creatures come to "watch" them every night. The second in my Shyamalan double feature, this was directed by his daughter Ishana Night.
Where Trap was silly, this movie is nonsense. Yes, these are meaningfully different in my head. 😅 This movie has greater ambitions, but its ideas are so scattered.
• It’s basically a creature feature, but the creatures are faires. Sure, okay.
• The main character Mina has an identical twin named Lucy, but this Dracula reference adds absolutely nothing.
• There are a lot of different instances of the theme of mimicry or likeness, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Mina’s emotional struggles or arc.
• The bird is a plot macguffin that hangs around most of the movie doing nothing and then leaves the narrative in the third act. (It’s alive and fine, though.)
• Like Trap, this movie eventually loses interest in its “trapped in a location” premise and wanders off to finish its story elsewhere, at which point the momentum and tension come to a screeching and permanent halt.
I’m reminded of Cuckoo, another indie horror movie with maybe more ideas than it knew how to execute, but Cuckoo looks like a screenwriting/directing/editing masterclass compared to this. Which is unfortunate, because IMO the cast was pretty good, and the cosmic elements could have been really cool and weird in the right hands.
All that said, I’m interested to see what Ishana Night Shyamalan does next. This was bad, but it wasn't boring, and I definitely did not guess where it was going.