nekare

I talk a good game about giving up on books you're not enjoying, and I am pretty good at DNF-ing books at, like, 10-15%, but I find it very difficult to give upon a book after I've gotten much past that.

Which is probably why I have spent weeks now trying to convince myself that I really am going to go back to Awakened by A.E. Osworth (put down at 40% sometime in mid August). I so wanted to like it - the summary is a coven of trans witches fight an evil AI. Cool, eh? I never got to that bit, I bounced off it for, actually, the same reason I can't get on with the Gideon the Ninth books; the narrator has the same too online, wryly twee, queer elder millennial voice. And I know that the reason I find that voice oh so grating is that I talk like that. During one of the hotter days this summer I was in a pub beer garden with a mate and I described our environs as 'a bit fire hazard-y.'

Moving on, what should I read instead? Read anything good recently?

Comics wise I did read Absolute Wonder Woman: The Last Amazon which I loved almost as much as Absolute Superman. The AU is that Diana was raised in Hell by Circe the witch. So like, she's still Wonder Woman, still extending her hand in friendship, but she is riding a skeletal pegasus, and performing dark magic, and constantly covered in blood. She's got a magic prosthetic arm because she sacrificed her real arm as part of, like, a blood spell. It's badass...and Steve Trevor is still kind of a lame love interest.

I only got as far as the first issue of Absolute Batman, but I am generally a harder sell on Bruce in general. I do want to give some of the other absolute runs a shot before they get folded into the wider DC universe or some sort of giant, ridiculous crossover event and I completely lose interest.

And I did read the first issue of G. Willow Wilson's Black Cat, which seems like it's going to be a lot of fun, although I will be bummed if it turns out Felicia wasn't actually flirting with Night Nurse.

Speaking of comics, I think I got my friend Al in trouble with his wife. So Al has no fewer than one thousand (1000) trade paperbacks stacked up in his garage, and the reason that he has been giving for why he hasn't gotten rid of them yet is that I was going to come round to go through them and take anything I wanted. So the other week I'd been round watching a movie with the wife and she said "Hey, while you're here do you want to have a look at those comics in the garage?" and I said "Huh?" while clearly wearing the facial expression of someone who was just learning this information for the first time.

Oops.

So someday soon I have to clear a morning so I can go round and stand in Al's garage going through a literal ton of comics.

Okay, I couldn't really think what else to call this, because this is mostly just recent fics that I want to roll around in like a kitten in catnip. This fandom has tons of gloriously iddy h/c, casefic, longfic, and plotty WIPs, both of the AU and non-AU variety. So this is some of what's been delighting me lately. All of these are complete unless otherwise noted.

(Also see bookverse short gen in the last post, if you missed it.)

One of the still unfinished WIPs I've been following with enjoyment is this:

Robbing the Hood by Rilleshka (gen, AU, currently 11 chapters/68K and still updating) - A SPACE PIRATE AU, really well thought out and probably the kind of thing that will sprawl onwards for a long time without any particular resolution, but I'm just enjoying the ride. It's canon divergent rather than a total AU; early in its post-governor-module life, Murderbot ends up on a ship that's attacked by raiders, the crews of both ships are wiped out, and now MB is alone with the grieving bot pilot of the raider ship, and the two embark on a freelance piracy career for survival, eventually ending up falling headfirst into semi-accidentally rescuing human trafficking victims. (The bot pilot is an OC, not ART - ART's around, but essentially this AU is following the widening spiral of various changes that take place due to MB not being around to e.g. help PreservationAux or Tapan's group.)

This AU does something that very often doesn't work for me, where the found family consists of mostly different people in this 'verse, including OCs and people who never met in canon. (The first one they rescue is a pre-ART Tarik, left to die after he's injured on a death squad mission.) But it really works for me! The AU takes the time to build up the various AU relationships, and it's rich with worldbuilding on the state of piracy in the Murderbot universe, including a gloriously OTT pirate base and some other interesting locations.

The author also has this wonderfully harrowing (complete) fic from last year:

Undefinable Boundaries (gen, 26K, post-canon)
Murderbot is killed on a mission, but that's not the end; its friends, including ART, Three, and PresAux, try to bring it back and rebuild it. Just incredibly wrenching and painful and sweet, and it does have a happy ending.

Moving on, these are pretty much all Murderbot & Gurathin-centric with lots of h/c. This one just dropped today:

Over Imperfect Bones by lookninjas (gen, 8K)
A full on idfest of the "trauma-bonded characters refuse to be more than few feet from each other" trope. Something *really* bad happened to MB, we don't know what for a while, but it can't see or speak or move, except one hand, and it will not let go of Gurathin's hand; we don't find out why for a while either. The way this slowly drops the details of what happened to them and lets the reader read between the lines to what everyone isn't talking about is really well done. There's also some nice stuff with ART, Mensah, and Ratthi.

This one is more thriller/plotty action rather than h/c:

Distress Call by e_va (gen, 9K)
Murderbot wakes up in a cargo container, unable to move, and the only person it can get in touch with is Gurathin, who appears to be on the ship with it. Lots of nice action/spy stuff with bonding and mutual worry.

( A few more plotty and hurt/comforty gen )

See also my Murderbot recs from May over at recthething, when I was first getting into it (all bookverse).

So I've been wallowing around in all the good fic in this fandom lately, and I'm finally getting around to posting some recs here. I'll start off with something pretty basic: bookverse gen featuring a variety of characters.

( 9 short bookverse genfics )

The justmarriedexchange revealed today, and I adore my gift!

Precipice (Biggles/EvS, 3300 wds)
Takes a Holiday AU in which things go very differently after Erich goes looking for Biggles when he's hiding in the attic. Incredibly sensual, wonderful character voices and a great sense of their mingled attraction and enmity/distrust; it's tense and sexy and just exactly what I want from them at this point in canon. The author's notes hint at a possible sequel, which I would LOVE and - no pressure! - hope that it does happen someday. <3

My original plan was to make pork chops with peach butter for dinner tonight, but then no peaches arrived with my grocery order, so I did a quick pivot to pork chops in lemon-caper sauce (NYT gift link) and they are delicious. I think it would also be very good with chicken if you don't eat pork (or eggplant, which seems to be my veggie substitute for meat these days, though it is more labor-intensive).

Anyway, I substituted a half-cup of chicken broth with a tablespoon of white wine vinegar for the wine and forgot to add the flour until I'd already added the broth, but it all turned out all right. Definitely recommended!

*

In other news, I've had Saja Boys' Soda Pop stuck in my head all day. "Tom's Diner" vanquishes it briefly but then it returns. It's a cute song! Very catchy! I'd like to not have it in my head all day!

*

Strange New disappointments
Straight New Worlds
Strange New Worlds

I frickin' loved the first season of SNW. The second season included one of my all time favourite episodes of Star Trek (the Lower Decks crossover). I was so hyped for season three...and, like, it was bad? So bad that I was like...did I hallucinate this show ever being good?

Thus follows a brief list of my gripes about S3 of SNW:

1. It's not funny. I agree with the reviewer who said that this season desperately wants to be Lower Decks, except the writers don't have the comedy chops, so you end up with a season that is 50% "comedy" episodes, culminating in the episode Four and a Half Vulcans a thuddingly unfunny episode of television that was nonetheless teased at comic con last year, like they inexplicably thought that was them putting their best foot forward.

2. Speaking of Lower Decks, the nostalgia bait of LD worked because sometimes it was super weird, and sometimes it was a deep cut, but it always felt like it was written by people with a deep knowledge and love of Star Trek, while the callbacks in SNW all feel like they were written by people who vaguely remember having watched The Original Series as kids.

Like, at the end of the episode Terrarium, actually one of the better episodes of the season, the freakin' Metrons turn up to monologue, all like, "We have trapped a human and a Gorn together on a planet, and we will do it again!" And, like, we all remember the episode with Kirk and the Gorn. It's a very famous episode! They made fun of it in Galaxy Quest. And, like, anyone who doesn't know, doesn't know who goshdarn Metrons are either!

3. The overwhelming, bordering of offensive, heterosexuality of SNW is not new - I've said before that making a big ensemble show in the 2020s with not even a token queer character feels like a very deliberate choice has been made - but it did feel like it's stepped up a gear this season. There was a trailer for S3 that went like: "All New Worlds! All New Adventures! All New Relationships!"

And, like, Sorry? What? Pardon? Who is watching Star Trek for the romance?

This gripe has sub clauses, y'all

a) I did not especially care for the Spock/Chapel ship in the first two seasons, it felt like it took over the show slightly, and turned what was basically 'two co-workers have a weird vibe because one has a crush on the other and maybe they had an inadvisable snog at the work x-mas party' into an interminable story of star-crossed lovers. Then they dropped it like a hot potato, because it felt like the writers belatedly realised that the ship as written didn't jibe with turning SNW into the Original Series.

b) I didn't actually hate Spock/La'an; it was low key, didn't overwhelm the show the way it felt like Spock/Chapel had, made sense for both characters. It was just that it fit into a pattern this season of the writers having no interest in their female characters beyond deciding which dude's tongues they were going to shove into their mouthes.

c) I like Patton Oswald, and I'm usually happy to see him pop up, and I might have disliked this less if I felt like I had learned anything about Una this season other than she's definitely straight y'all.

d)Beto Ortegas--

Hang on, this sub clause has addendums

i. Erica Ortegas has a brother, doubling her number of known character traits to 1) flies ship, and 2) has brother.

ii. That brother is the pivotal character in an episode called What is Starfleet? which concludes that Starfleet is a bunch of people who almost do a warcrime and then decide not to at the last minute.

iii. Said brother has a stilted, awkward, and unconvincing romance with Uhura. I mean, it wasn't like they were doing anything else with the iconic character of Nyota Uhura, right?

iv. There is an episode where Erica is lost on a hostile planet and Uhura is orders of magnitude more upset than the rest of the crew which would have made a bajillion times more sense if Erica and Uhura had been the ones to have the flirtation/relationship.

I know writers who use compulsory heterosexuality, they are all cowards.

4. Captain Pike has a love interest named Captain Batel. She nearly died at the end of S2, he was very sad about that; at the end of S3 she turns into a statue, and Pike is very sad about that too. I have no idea what Marie Batel thinks about this Nu Who ass ending because the show cares about her character so little that it can't even be bothered to decide what her job is, over the course of her guest appearances she is 1) a starship captain, 2) a courtroom lawyer, 3) a starship captain again, 4) on the supreme court, I guess.

Anyway, she's a statue now.

I fell down a rabbit hole this evening reading the comment reblogs on this Tumblr post on 90s TV. I ended up deciding to copy some of them here to save them from the inevitable linkrot and post decay.

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/794609119262900224

Original post:

I don't know what those '90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they'd start doing it again

#they de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so that you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress
#they made statements about the world through allegory
#they invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between their characters
#they assumed that their audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there
#and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and even sometimes to predict the ending
#dont even get me started on this i will go ALL DAY

I don't agree with every single point in every reblog. I also think there's quite a bit of TV now that still does most or all of this, though usually it's the dramas and procedurals rather than scifi, and a lot that's not great about 90s and earlier TV. But there is also a lot of food for thought in here, so I just threw a bunch of the comments into this post to mull over.

The asterisks separate out each different reblog; basically each is its own separate comment, generally in dialogue with the original post rather than each other.

Thoughts are welcome!

( Under the cut )

A couple weeks ago, I finally realized I was never going to go to someone else to get my hair cut, so with some encouragement from my sister, this morning, I did an extensive detangling (both before and after washing) and then trimmed about 3" off the bottom myself. Is it even? Probably not, but it was in long layers, so I don't think it really matters. It will eventually even out as it grows and I trim it. Mostly what matters is that after 3 years, the old ends have been trimmed away. And now that I know I can do it, I will try to keep up with it on a more timely basis. At least, I don't think I'll let another 3 years go by. *wry*

*

The Mets did not get no-hit last night but they did lose, and then lost again today despite leading for 7.5 innings. *hands* There is something very wrong with this team, but who can say what? Sigh.

*

Whumptober ficlet status: 12/31 (4 Biggles, 2 Bab5, 6 Murderbot)

I put in a tentative signup for trickortreatex. This is the first time in at least 3 years that I'm not requesting Biggles, because greerwatson (of "Unrequested Nazis Are Awesome, Actually" fame) usually does this exchange and I don't want to accidentally summon her. :P However, it's early yet and I'm still adding fandoms, so I'll see if I feel like it's worth the risk later on. (I don't really mind so much being assigned to her as a writer; I can always write the minimum and leave it anon. But ugh.) Also, while my motivation is - let's be real - mostly avoiding Greer, it made me realize that I've requested Biggles in every exchange since spring 2022 and it might be fun to cast my net wider this time, and request some fandoms I haven't asked for in a while.

Also, I put in a signup for spook_me, the annual Halloween/horror challenge with art prompts that I've been doing every year, or at least most years, since their very first round back on LJ in the late 2000s.* True, my years of finishing anything for it are relatively rare, but it's genuinely one of my favorite events of the year, and I will be very sad whenever they stop doing it.

*(Edit: their first year was - HOLYSHIT - 2006, I found their master list on LJ, and I did actually write for it that year. I thought I remembered participating in the first one! This means this is their 20th year, and I've signed up for most of those years. What even.)

**(Edit2: The first spook-me signup post from 2006. I completely forgot that early on, they asked you to veto what you *didn't* want to write for, and then assigned you a creature and art prompt!)

In other news, Casefic Exchange revealed! I wrote Smuggler's Beach, a 13K post-Buries a Hatchet Biggles/EvS fic that is basically Biggles Goes Alone but with Erich along this time.

Friday sundries:

= Wow, have I really not posted since Sunday? This week was pretty busy at work and I guess my Elementary rewatch, plus reading a very very long Batfamily time travel story (still in progress *sobs*), and also watching the Mets' downward spiral, left me uninspired.

= I didn't watch them blow a lead last night and lose, because it's so disheartening - there is like no sense that they can hold a lead or come back if they are losing. I'm only planning to watch tonight to see if they get no-hit by Jacob deGrom on his first return to Citi Field as a Texas Ranger. #the existential futility of being a mets fan <- my tag is too long for DW but it is accurate

= I did make it through week one of our family survivor football league - my niece decided on doing a survivor league this year since it is much less work for everyone than a fantasy league. In it, each week, everyone picks one team to win, and either you win and move on, or you lose and are out, though we are doing it with 2 strikes, so you can lose twice before you are out. And you can only pick each team once, so you can't, like, ride the Packers or whoever to victory every week. My strategy is basically to pick whoever is playing the New Orleans Saints, since they are predicted to be the worst team in the league this year. I made it through last week, anyway. *g*

= Usually I have my groceries delivered on Friday afternoon but somehow in my infinite wisdom last night while I was updating the order, I rescheduled it for Sunday afternoon. And then I was in a meeting from 8:30 am - 11 am this morning, so it was too late to move it back to today when I discovered what I'd done. So I left it where it was and will just order pizza for dinner tonight and then have it breakfast and lunch tomorrow as well!

= Anyway, the world is a vampire. Uh, trash fire. But there will be pizza and baseball and probably sleeping in tomorrow. Hopefully it is cool enough to leave the AC off tonight - it was for most of the week, but then last night was not. And since I had to be up an hour earlier than usual (see above re: 8:30 am meeting), I didn't want to spend precious time tossing and turning because I was too hot to sleep.

*

D&D is cancelled tonight so that the DM can drug herself into a stupor and try to get more than 3-4 hours of sleep for once. As for me, I think that I'm going to take a short nap for the next hour or so and then settle in to play video games all night.

I'm leaning towards playing more of that Mass Effect: Andromeda playthrough that I started last weekend, although I may switch over to Baldur's Gate 3 or Dragon Age: The Veilguard for at least a while. We'll just have to see what my brain seems most interested in tonight.

Hey, there was a positive for once today!

Me: Here's my money to cover another another week in the hotel.
Hotel Manager: Thank you. Would you like a brand new 43" TV to replace the 13-year-old 32" TV that you currently have?
Me: ... so is this a trick question?

But, yeah, they apparently are updating some of the televisions in the hotel, and the manager likes me enough that I'm near the front of the list. Which means I got a brand new TV in my suite today!

My poor cleric, Siân, has had a really bad couple of weeks in-game. Over the course of the last not even a full two weeks, she has:

- woken up from being held captive by mind-controlling plants for a week
- found herself in a prison camp in the middle of a warzone
- watched a friend die while trying to escape said prison camp
- failed to resurrect said friend
- watched the resurrection fail again when someone else attempted a higher level spell
- found out that her family has been accused of treason and placed under arrest
- found out that a bunch of powerful nobles want to make her father emperor
- saw the instant destruction of an entire town via a weapon of mass destruction
- watched the friend who died come back to life separate from his still-dead corpse
- given up the very last gift her deceased mother ever gave her
- had a bunch of ancient knowledge magically dumped in her head
- had her right arm chopped off
- found out that her father named her his legitimate daughter due to obvious coercion
- had her right arm unexpected regrown by way of alchemy
- almost been killed by malfunctioning golems
- almost watched her entire group be killed by a shadowspawn beholder
- been publicly seen with magic users in an empire where magic is illegal
- been involved in a very bloody battle
- joined a pirate fleet
- found out that the empire-wide newspaper has been smearing her name
- almost been killed by assassins
- found out an assassins' guild with a reputation for never quitting has been hired to kill her
- been involved in another very bloody battle
- found out that she's one of the most wanted people in the entire empire
- almost been killed by lightning
- almost drowned
- died instantly from a magical trap while in a shadow plane surrounded by enemies

Considering the circumstances of her death, I'm honestly not sure what's going to happen. Resurrection may or may not be on the table, especially considering the rest of the group is about to go into a pretty massive bit of combat without a healer.

Next week, I'm planning on basically just being off camera the entire night unless something very unexpected happens. I'll figure out future plans after I see what happens in-game over the next, uh, 60 seconds or so.

They do technically at least have access to an item that will let them cast unlimited Gentle Repose, but said item is on their ship which is currently shrunk and inside a bottle. Plus said item is being used on the dead body of the group member who came back to life by other means and therefore has both a mostly-alive body and a corpse sitting on the ship, so... yeah.

(Don't ask. Trust me.)

I was doing quite well for myself and then a. I got stranded in the middle of a book I was enjoying for some stupid reason and b. got hit by a busy patch. Slightly under a month this time, anyway, and the books were largely enjoyable ones!

( Very chatty this evening apparently! )

Okay! Lots to say about a lot of those, apparently that's what comes of writing late in the evening after a long day!

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Autumn starts in about a week-and-a-half, and the first day of fall is on a Monday this year. Which, you know, kinda bodes well for new beginnings in my mind since it's the first of the work week at least. And, considering how things have been going so far in September, I feel like I really need a set point for a fresh start.

So, you know, Mabon works fairly well for that.

Things have been pretty chaotic in my life the last year or two for a variety of reasons, and I think that I'm going to force myself to set up a strict daily schedule to start following again come September 22. I won't stick to it forever, but I've found in the past that the structure really does help me even if it's just for a month or so to get me back in the habit.

Now I just have to force myself to start thinking about a set schedule that will work for me while still having some flexibility for when things don't go quite as planned...

DW catchup continues ... I posted this on AO3 yesterday, and I wrote most of this fic in the car, actually, on the 7-hour drive home from my mom's part of Alaska. I would drive for a while and think of a new section of fic and stop to write a bit on my laptop.

Crime and Punishment (Murderbot books, Mensah POV, 2500 words)
Missing scene/tag for Fugitive Telemetry. Mensah gets a call from station security. (Entirely bookverse.)

Follow-up on

Spoilers for Fugitive Telemetry

the refugee shooting Murderbot in the novella.

Mostly fluff and banter, in spite of the actual topic.

( Fic under the cut )

I've fallen behind on watching Critical Role's various specials and miniseries since they went on their CR3-to-CR4 hiatus, mostly because they've been releasing them on Beacon and then eventually showing them on their Thursday stream. That's made it hard for me to convince my brain to keep up with things, because I need a set schedule to follow every week that I'm watching alongside other people, so... yeah.

This is part of why I have trouble watching a lot of streaming shows (it was a problem with Rings of Power especially but there have been lots of others that I just never got around to watching at all), because for my brain there's a difference between "watching live with everyone else" like with more traditional shows and "watching it when I have the time because once it drops everyone's watching it at different times so it's pointless to watch it immediately."

Anyway, I really want to force myself to get caught up in the lead-up to CR4 starting - if only to get myself used to watching their long episodes again - so I'm going to list out the various specials that I still need to properly watch. And then I'm going to try to set aside the time to watch them over the next few weeks. If I can manage it, I may also try to make a few posts about them as I watch them, but watching them in the first place is my priority.

If I have time, I'll also try to watch Age of Umbra, which I started but had to drop because of stuff going on with work and IRL at the time. It's lower on the list, though, so we'll see if I manage it. And, hey, if a miracle happens then maybe I'll even find the time to watch some other miniseries they've had going further back that I never found the time to watch.

But, yeah. We'll see how it goes? Live Shows are the "must watch" part of the list. Everything else is just gravy.

( List under the cut. )

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.