enemyofperfect | Reading

Name: Holly
Age group: Mid-30's
Country: United States (West Coast)
Subscription/Access Policy: Anyone can subscribe, but all access list people are vetted beforehand! Prefer 25+, but 18+ is an absolute must.

Main Fandoms: The Elder Scrolls (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, ESO), Baldur's Gate 3, The Legend of Zelda ( Ocarina of Time --> Twilight Princess), Silent Hill (1-4)

Other Fandoms: The Witcher (books up to The Tower of the Swallow and Witcher 3), Dragon Age (Origins --> Inquisition), Fallout (3, New Vegas, 4, Prime Video series), Dishonored (1&2), The Evil Within/Psychobreak (1&2), The Longest Journey trilogy, The Devil Came Through Here trilogy, Bridgerton, The Sims (1-4), Ancient Magus Bride, Apothecary Diaries, Arcane (Netflix, I've never played LoL and I never will), Once Upon A Time (up to Season 5 I think???), Harry Potter (I do not support the author's stance against trans people, I just enjoy the fanworks at this point), Life Is Strange (1 & Before The Storm).

Fannish Interests: Playlists, writing, art, moodboards, theory essays, character studies, fan-OC discussions, psychology

OTPs and Ships: Halsin/Astarion (BG3), Gortash/Durge (BG3), Severus/Lily (HP), Tom/Bellatrix (HP), Harry/Draco (HP), Ganondorf/Zelda (LoZ), Jayce/Viktor (Arcane)

Favourite Movies: Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Pan's Labyrinth, Death Becomes Her, Shaun of the Dead, Forrest Gump, The Witches of Eastwick, Practical Magic

Music: Classical, classic/hard rock, symphonic metal, folk music, grunge

Before you follow: I write lengthy annotations of novels I'm reading that may be intended for 18+, and some of my creative works veer in that direction as well, so PLEASE no minor interactions! 🙏🏻 I also curse a lot, and talk about some heavy subjects that occur in my own life (under cut and with content warnings in the Reason for Age Restriction field, like a civilized netizen), so if that's not your cup of tea, we might have issues connecting.

rachelmanija

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.

I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis

The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

boxofdelights

I hosted book group last Sunday and I'm only just feeling recovered today. We read How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community, by Mia Birdsong, which is a very timely book about weaving the web of connections that we all need to survive the current omnidisaster. Eight people showed up at my house!

I made broccoli & tofu with peanut sauce, a tomato-lentil dish, spiced nuts (sweet and not sweet), and served salad, bread, cheese and crackers. My friend Karen made mojitos.

I also had door prizes: a stack of books. Six of them went home with someone.

( pics )

pauraque

Concluding Pride Month media, I played Get in the Car, Loser! which is a queer road trip fantasy RPG. The lead developer Christine Love is a trans woman, and I'm not sure if everyone who worked on the game is trans but it looks like it's at least a high proportion.

combat scene where queer gen Z kids do battle with weird fantasy monsters

combat scene where queer gen Z kids do battle with weird fantasy monsters

The story primarily focuses on Sam, an anxious goth trans girl who's studying magic in college. Her classmate Grace steals a mystical sword and then recruits Sam to be her party's healer on a quest to defeat the evil Machine Devil (who, disappointingly, isn't this guy). It's going to be a bit of a drive to the Machine Devil's lair, but fortunately Grace's nonbinary partner Valentin has a car, and also serves as the party's tank. The contemporary-fantasy worldbuilding is only lightly sketched but that's all that's needed; the quest to beat the Machine Devil just provides a framework for the characters to talk to each other, build connections, and grapple with their own insecurities and inner conflicts.

( Read more... )

Get in the Car, Loser! is normally $24.99 USD on Steam, but is currently on sale for $17.49 USD, so this would be a good time to pick it up if it sounds like your thing!

rionaleonhart

Please let us talk to Kris, Deltarune. It's all I want.

It's very weird to write a fic in which one of the central characters is the player of the game! Obviously it's not possible to write a representation that reflects every player, so how do you approach it?

I've ended up writing someone who's not quite me, but who played the game in a similar way and holds similar attitudes towards it. Hopefully it'll ring reasonably true for other players, or at least not outright ring false. (With the possible exception of the part where I push my 'Kris has an unrequited crush on Noelle' agenda, because I could not resist.)

Title: Communication
Fandom: Deltarune
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2,000
Summary: Kris has a conversation with the soul.
Warnings: Alludes to events and revelations from chapter four of Deltarune.

( Communication )

helloladies posting in

ladybusiness

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.

( Read more... )

schneefink

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 )

pauraque

Note: Emezi is nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after this book was published, so earlier reviews may misgender them, as does the jacket bio.

This autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.

Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. So it's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.

The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unafraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.

Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.

I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.

Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.

umadoshi

Over a month after the arrival of our (in my case, long-yearned-for) Microclimate Air3 powered respirators, I finally took mine out on its maiden voyage yesterday. (It may result in me going more places than I have been, but it may also mainly result in me feeling safer in the places I do go.)

Yesterday there was a casual in-person meeting at Dayjob where the team properly met the two people who our office's managing editor answers to. Donuts were promised (and turned out to be quality donuts, although I opted not to bring one home with me [since I sure wasn't about to unmask to eat anything there!]. Fun times in needing to be picky about what I spend my sugar intake on). We also had a heat warning, so I was all the more glad/relieved to have a drive to and from the meeting rather than taking transit for the first time in, oh, three years or so.

I'll put most of the rest under a cut, but I do want to note--especially since probably at least one or two of you clicked on the link for the Air3, and the price looks horrifying--that I'm incredibly glad we didn't order ours immediately when they first became available, because at that point the Air3 alone (as opposed to the kit) was more like $1000 USD. The original plan wasn't for

scruloose to get one at all, given that initial price and given that they have a respirator setup that works well for them. But then a few weeks later, the price dropped to $549(/$649 for the kit with extra stuff, which is what we opted for, as well as a few extra filters etc. in the name of minimizing future need to deal with shipping), so we got to say "Well, that's still really spendy, but it's also now not completely outrageous to get two." (And then we wound up having to contact the company because of shipping/import charge shenanigans, but those were on the courier's side, not Microclimate's, and the person

scruloose dealt with was great, so it's all good.)

I should also note that one of the review videos I watched about this made sure to point out clearly that its price (which initially was a MAJOR jump up from how much the Air2 cost when that was available) was in line with the cost of other NIOSH-certified powered respirators. It's far from cheap, but it's not the gouging attempt it might seem like. (I do wonder what the deal was with the massive price drop so soon after its release, though!)

( And now, the actual experience: )

Current Mood: pleased

rionaleonhart

When I have a fic idea, I’ll usually scribble it down in the back of my diary. It’s time to switch diaries again, so it’s time for the annual fic concept roundup!

This post lists all the fic ideas at the back of my 2024-25 diary. If I’ve written the fic, I’ll include a link to it. If I’ve started the fic, I’ll share a snippet. If I haven’t started it, I’ll write at least a hundred words on the spot.

First of all, here are the fics I’ve written in full. (To be clear, this isn’t all the fics I’ve written over the past year; it’s just the ones I’d previously noted the idea for in my diary.) Fandoms: Scrubs, Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, Death Note, Omori, Better Half, Severance, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.

( Written fics from my 2024-25 diary. )

Next, let’s look at the works in progress (or at least the works that were started; I’m not sure they’re actively progressing). Fandoms: Death Note, Metaphor ReFantazio, Severance, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Danganronpa. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.

( In-progress fics from my 2024-25 diary. )

Finally, it’s time for the fic ideas I haven’t touched and now have to write something for. This is always intimidating, but I’ll give it a go!

Fandoms: NEO: The World Ends with You, Severance, Death Note, Dexter, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Deltarune. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.

( 2024-25 fics I hadn't started... until now. )

As ever, I have no idea whether any of these will end up becoming full fics, but I’m glad to have written at least a little for each concept!

delphi

Fandom 50 #21

Untitled Ouizzy Vampire AU by

derekstilinski
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Frenchie/Izzy Hands
Medium: Gifset
Length: 3 gifs
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: dark/horror, ambiguous ending, constructed reality, au: supernatural, infatuation, temptation, fear play, bloodplay (distantly implied)

Description:

In the first gif, Izzy steps uncertainly through the doorway of an abandoned church and stops in front of a flight of stairs. Frenchie jumps out at him theatrically onto the landing above, grinning in front of a full-length panel of stained glass. In the second, Frenchie's eyes glow and his lips part in the dark confines of a confessional. In the shadows on the other side, we glimpse Izzy's rapt and frightened eyes. In the third, Frenchie says something tensely and then flashes a persuasive fanged smile in the vestibule of the church, intercut with Izzy staring at him and swallowing hard, one hand pressed to the side of his face and neck.

This is my second rec for a constructed reality graphic from this same creator, and this one uses some absolutely brilliant editing to bring together what I'm pretty sure is Vengeance Is Mine and an episode of the TV show Bedlam (neither of which involve vampires) to create an AU where vampire!Frenchie and human!Izzy have a charged encounter in an abandoned church. The application of colour, the selection of eyelines, and the addition of other small edits all make this incredibly convincing, and the concept itself is very, very good to me.

I imagine this Izzy having some sort of protective interest in the church—a paid caretaker, a nosy neighbour, maybe a former vicar or member of the congregation who lost his faith after some tragic event. Whatever it is, he intends to roust out whoever's been squatting there, only to slide straight through "Oh no, he's hot" to "Oh fuck, that's a vampire" and into a dark and hot standoff between charmed predator and captivated prey.

Seriously, this is the gift of

derekstilinski's work. Three gifs and a fully formed universe full of potential stories pops into existence.

oracne

The Big Bundle of Queer Awesomeness is 100 books for $100 - you can also scroll down on this page for the smaller bundles, sorted by genre.

Itch.io gives authors a larger portion of the royalties, which is why I've been giving them some promotion. My lesbian erotica reprint collection, "Spicy Sapphic Treats," is in the Contemporary and Historical bundle as well as the big one.

rionaleonhart

Hey, do you want more Deltarune rambling?

[ Yes ♥ Yes ]

MORE DELTARUNE RAMBLING IT IS. I wish I could write fanfiction, but, when I try to think of a concept, I just find myself feverishly analysing this game.

In today's entry, I try to pin down everything I can establish about Kris so far! I thought for a long time that silent protagonists just didn't interest me, but I am fascinated by Kris.

There are spoilers here for all of Deltarune so far, including the Snowgrave route. Some things have probably slipped my mind, and I haven't beaten the game's optional bosses, so I may be missing some details we learn there.

( What do we know about Kris? )

Also, here's a little follow-up thought on my 'Kris has a crush on Noelle' theory, i.e. more transparent Kris/Noelle shipping disguised as serious analysis. Not really spoilery, but does discuss an optional conversation in chapter three of Deltarune.

( Who are you bringing to the festival? )

Am I biased and/or overthinking? Almost certainly. But I still feel a lot is clicking into place now that I'm viewing Deltarune through this lens.

shadaras

My dojo had a seminar this past weekend, which was lovely. The mat was full but not crowded, the energy was fantastic, got to see a lot of excellent people, and we had more than enough food for everyone to eat after the seminar. (And none pizza, because we know better and are willing to put in a bit more effort to provide better sustenance.) Everyone had a good time! Great practice! Love to take ukemi for sensei's demonstrations, and to get the vibe that she selected me not just for being a yudansha from the host dojo but because she enjoyed throwing me around!

Now we can start looking ahead to next year's seminar, which will be the dojo's 50th anniversary seminar. I think that the goal is for me to take nidan at that seminar, but it's far enough out (May 30th) that there's no particular plans yet.

When I was talking to my mom about this (a sidebar in a conversation mostly about scheduling me flying out to visit my family), she told me that next year would also be the 50th year since women could attend the air force academy.

She was a member of that first class of women.

She is much more excited about my dojo's 50th anniversary.

anyway it is TOO HOT right now and I can't wait for the heat dome currently covering the east coast to break so that it stops being high 90s F/feels like over 100 F. At least the seminar only had normal summer heat! Not this nonsense!

(this nonsense, btw, is hot enough that the building fire alarms went off because of the heat! nothing was actually wrong! it's just Too Hot! isn't that fun!)

forestofglory

Here's so thoughts about things I've been reading and watching recently:

The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon by Grace Lin— Read out loud to the kid. I loved Grace Lin’s other MG books so I was very excited for this! It was very charming. As always I enjoy the author’s illustrations. I enjoyed having Chinese mythical creatures in a modern city. I don’t love it quite as much as some of the author’s other work, but it was good and worth reading.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann Leblanc— I heard about this novella from a WisCon panel on recent trans SFF. It's about a space cheese maker who finds out the asteroid that houses her cheese cave is about to be yeetted into the sun. She is one of many people who is a copy of an original human, including the person she sells her cheese to and the woman she goes to for help. This book was maybe not as weird as it was presented to me, and some of the politics are exactly like current earth queer community debates. Still I loved all the details about food, and the bits of community building that were present around the edges of the story.

The Truth Season 3 cases 6 and 7— This is labeled as two cases but it's really one very long case! I was a little disappointed to have to wait a week for resolution. This case also featured some upsetting queer phobic violence as part of one character’s backstory. But there were a lot of fun things too. They fought zombies with bubble guns!

The Treasured Voice Season 6 ep 1 — I started watching this while I was waiting between episodes of The Truth. It’s a singing reality show featuring people pairing up to sing songs. It’s got Liu Yuning! I’ve only seen the first episode but it seems pretty chill so far though there are some judges who make negative comments.

( Maiden )

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.

pauraque

Flashing forward 75 years from The Autobiography of an Androgyne...

Stone Butch Blues is an autobiographical novel following Jess Goldberg, a queer working-class Jewish kid from upstate New York. It covers her 1950s childhood in which she is punished and rejected by her parents for not conforming to gender norms, her coming-of-age and finding a place as a butch in the lesbian community despite relentless police brutality, her decision to pursue medical transition, her partial detransition when she realizes she's neither a man nor a woman, her loves and losses, and her political awakening as a union organizer.

So, I came out as trans in the late 1990s, and two questions I soon grew to hate hearing were "Have you seen Boys Don't Cry?" and "Have you read Stone Butch Blues?" No, I hadn't, because I was already having a difficult time and I did not think I would find it helpful to consume media about people like me being raped and murdered, thanks. Well, I still haven't seen Boys Don't Cry (not planning to!) but now I have read Stone Butch Blues and I think I was right that reading it back then wouldn't have helped, except in that it would have given me more context for what some of the older people in the queer community had been through and why some of them treated me the way they did.

( Cut for length and content: hate crimes (in the book) and in-community hostility towards nonbinary people (in my own life). This post is more about me than about the book. )

Stone Butch Blues is available for free on Feinberg's website.

rionaleonhart

Last night, when I was about to go to bed, I had a sudden revelation about Deltarune: Kris has a crush on Noelle.

No, hear me out, I swear I'm not just being an overinvested shipper. I mean, I am being an overinvested shipper, but I still think I have grounds for believing this!

There are minor spoilers for chapter four of Deltarune below the cut.

( The case for Kris having a crush on Noelle. )

I'd love to write more Deltarune fanfiction, but it's tricky when there are so many unanswered mysteries! My main area of interest is Kris and their dynamics with other characters, but I feel I understand Kris less with every chapter that comes out. How can I write about them when I know so little about what's going on in their head?

I suppose that's why I'm doing so much rambling theorising. I can't write fanfiction, and these words have to go somewhere!

amorette posting in

addme_fandom

Name: Amorette or Via
Age group: 17+..I'm in college!
Country: USA
Subscription/Access Policy: all posts are public unless it's a vent, in that case only very close friends. Otherwise I am not picky. :)

Main Fandoms: Jurassic park / Jurassic World, Zenless Zone Zero, Wuthering waves
Other Fandoms: Minecraft, Dead rails (roblox), CRK, Pokemon, Animal Crossing
Fannish Interests: Digital art, Rarepairs / selfshipping
OTPs and Ships: Toya x Airi (pjsekai) , Neuvilette x Zhongli (GI), Jane x Sethos (ZZZ), Owen x Claire (Jurassic world)

Favourite Movies: All of the jurassic park + Jurassic world movies...
TV Shows: Kitchen Nightmares, Bar rescue
Music: Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot, Ghostemane, Kim Dracula, Rammstein, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Megurine Luka
Games: Wobbledogs, Webbing Journey, Wolf Quest, Planet Zoo, JWE2, Planet Crafter
Comics/Anime/Misc: D4DJ, Idolm@ster, Yuru Yuri, Yuri is my job, Harukana Recieve