#(I am singlehandedly bringing this movie to tumblr)

[wizzard890]

I've been climbing the walls about this moment in Oppenheimer since July and now that it's on streaming I'm making it all your problem.

[fatoujallovv]

fanfiction writer appreciation: skamverse edition

thank you @yasminaselamrani for starting this lil tag 🥺 i read and write elu so that’s what you’re in for here but i’m sending a kiss on the forehead to any writer or reader of anything for being the best 🥺💛

if you’re a writer:

a fic that you’re really proud of:

i know i’m sitting here while i haven’t even finished the fic but close to you just makes me really happy 🥺 it’s obviously not oscar winning movie adaptation worthy in the slightest but i think it’s turned out to be a really fun story and i’ve enjoyed writing it and messing around with social media 🤪

a fic that you were nervous to post:

my lil mental health oneshots rotten work and not to me, not if it’s you (incredibly original titles i know skfjfj) were literally . an excuse for a cathartic feelings dump via my emotional support projection character monsieur lucas lallemant and i felt like i was being to dramatic or insensitive or portraying things badly (even though it was literally my own experiences adskljg idk don’t ask what i was thinking) or being too personal so i was kind of nervous 🥺 but i got a lovely response and being able to share them was really healing for me so i’m so glad i did it 🥺

a fic you wished got more hits/kudos/comments:

i’m super happy with every bit of response i’ve gotten from my writing 🥺 i love all of my comments so so much and all i want to use this space for is to say thank you guys for being the best 🥺

one of your favorite tropes to write:

i think it’s obvious that it’s childhood best friends because both of my chaptered fics have been that sjdjfjsj but i also love myself some fake dating hence my current best friends fake dating au akdjfj

another ship that you don’t write but you’d like to write:

i wish i could write kieutou but i struggle to relate to kieu my’s perspective to be able to write her from an honest and accurate place bc as much as i adore her she is so so different from me and i feel like i can’t get in her head 🤧🤧

one of your abandoned wip you never wrote but wish you did:

i only ever abandoned one thing and it was gonna be a long oneshot where they met in the laundry room of their dorm and then dumbassery ensued and it was gonna be very silly but then i forgot about it so akdjfj mayhaps i should return to her this summer if i have the time

another writer you would love to collaborate with:

@luxandobscurus @lucasotteli and i have literally. planned to collab before and just never made it happen .... besties let’s get on that summer 2021

i would LOVE to do some sort of sm au or something with a cool unique format with miss @vexedtonightmares the queen of sm and galaxy brain concepts!!!!! i would basically be dead weight but i would be like beyond honored to assist her in making magic with her big beautiful brain

if you’re a reader:

a fic (or more) that you love to reread:

i looooove rereading if i can recognize real by @tawmlinsun (i’m linking part two i think oops) i have said it before but it gives me butterflies every time it is the peeeeerfect lil first kiss/getting together fic omg omg

the reread value of all mixed up by @lucasotteli and online love by @vexedtonightmares !!!!! unmatched !!!!! social media au supremacy lichrally go tos when i need a Laff

tag an author you always love reading:

@clairdelalune i know ur movin away from the fandom queen so soz to bring u into this but everything you’ve ever written makes me happy 🥺🥺 ur style and vibes are so . good and heartwarming

@lumierelovers is just an absolutely gorgeous writer and everything she touches is magical 🥺

recommend a story to your followers:

i will recommend lots 😌 (vaguely in order of length from like 1k to like 100k+)

when you kill the lights (and kiss my eyes) by @blanxkey (zaira i frickin miss u pls write more pure poetry 🤧)

thoughts of you aren’t enough by cgsf on ao3 (i think they might be on tumblr but it didn’t let me tag 😔)

open your heart (and let me know you want me here) by @demaury

save us by @luxandobscurus

last dance by @vexedtonightmares (i linked the chap 2 post bc it has the ao3 link but 😌)

maybe it starts now by @lepetitepeach (first part of the series is linked on ao3 bc i don’t think there’s a ficpost)

tag an author you discovered recently:

@fireflysxx is kinda new to writing and i’m so proud of herrrrrr 🤧🤧🤧 i would like to direct your attention to the fic she wrote for me about eliott basically being grumpy lucas’s personal shopper for the day akdjdh: new style

spread the love!

tag someone who inspires you to write:

@yasminaselamrani you literally never stop like i am so impressed you just always have new stories to tell i admire that so much even if i don’t read wtfock i’m sorry 🤧🤧🤧

tag someone who you’ve admired forever:

i don’t want to bother people and i feel like many of the people i’ve had longstanding Big Admiration for i already tagged or isn’t really here anymore 🥺 so just like . everyone i’ve mentioned i admire so much? that’s cheating but idc

tag your writing support:

@luxandobscurus and @lucasotteli the only ones who care as much about elu in 2021 as me and i don’t feel guilty making them help me with my fics KAJDJDJD and @fireflysxx my biggest cheerleader and self proclaimed number one fan you’re always there wanting to see what i’ve made and it’s so encouraging 🥺💛 also @thenerd10 bc u always leave me the sweetest comments EVER and you literally singlehandedly make posting worth it 🤧🤧💛💓💗💓

ok i’m tagging everyone i mentioned 🥺 and i would tag more people but i haven’t seen a lot of my writer friends around in a while and i don’t want to be bothering anyone so please just do this if you see it and want to!!!

[cctinsleybaxter]

2020 in books

2020 was a year of changed reading habits; people reading more than ever or not at all, some changing their tastes and others turning to old comforts. While there weren’t any huge overhauls on my end, more free time did mean a total of 32 in a wider range of genres. In the past couple of years I found a lot of the things I read to be kind of middling and ranked them accordingly, but this year had some strong contenders in the mix. With college officially behind me I love nonfiction again, and I really need to stop being drawn in by novels with long titles that ‘sound interesting.’ A piece of advice to my future self: they will only make you angry.

The Good

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky I loved the BBC radio play when I first listened to it back in 2017, but didn’t know if I could stomach the idea of actually reading the 700-page book, especially since I already knew the plot (spoiler alert: this had no effect and I gasped multiple times despite knowing what was going to happen; Fyodor’s just that good at atmosphere.) The story follows Prince Lev Myshkin, a goodhearted but troubled man entering 1860s Petersburg high society and meeting all of the wretched people therein as he navigates life, laughs, love, unanswerable questions of faith, and human suffering. I care about it in the same way I think other people care about reality TV shows and soap operas. I’m so personally invested in the drama and feel so many different emotions directed at these clowns that it’s like being a fan of Invitation to Love (with an ending equally upsetting to that of the show ITL is from, Twin Peaks.)

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlanksy I adored this book. The first half reads a little like a Wikipedia article, and I was worried that it was leaning too clinical and would be disaffected with colonialism and indigenous peoples, but even that oversight is corrected for as the text goes on. It’s not going to be for everybody because it really is just the world’s longest encyclopedia entry on, well, salt, but it’s written with such excitement for the topic and is so well-researched and styled for commercial nonfiction that I think it deserves any and all praise it’s gotten. We have to talk about that time Cheshire was literally sinking into the ground, and companies who were over-pumping brine water to steal each other’s brine water said ‘no it’s okay it’s supposed to that’ so were legally dismissed as suspects.

Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy Cried. 10/10. The plot of Midnight Cowboy is very classic and actually has a lot in common with The Idiot, as 20-something Joe Buck moves from the American Southwest to NYC and meets myriad challenges as a sex worker. I’ve been obsessed with the movie for a few years now and the book made me appreciate it anew; I think it’s rare for an adaptation to take the risk of being so different from its source material while still capturing its spirit. The movie doesn’t include quieter moments like the full conversation with Towny or time spent in the X-flat, nor does it attempt to touch Joe’s internal monologue or his and Rico’s extensive backstories, but these things are essential to the book and are some of the best and most affecting writing I’ve ever read. Finally! The Great American Novel!

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones I would firmly like to say that this is probably the best horror novel ever written. The setup is very traditional in that it’s about a group of friends facing supernatural comeuppance for a past mistake, but delivery on that premise is anything but familiar. A story about personal and cultural trauma that raises questions about what we owe to each other and what it means to be Blackfeet, with a cast that’s unbelievably real and sympathetic even at their absolute worst. Creepypasta writers trying to cash in on the cultural mythos of lumped-together tribes wish they were capable of writing something a tenth as gruesome and good as this. It could very well be a movie the visuals and writing style were so arresting, and I can’t wait to read whatever Jones writes next.

Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas This is the least accessible title on the list since it’s a college textbook for people with background in film, but it was so nice to read a woman unpacking film theory with the expertise and confidence it deserves that I have to rank it among the best. I had an absolute blast reading it and am going to have to stop myself from bringing up the horror of 1960s safety films as a cocktail icebreaker.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson

The year’s toughest read by far, but also its most rewarding. Thompson uses mountains of documents, government-buried intel, and personal interviews to explain what happened at Attica from beginning to end, and does a fantastic job of balancing hard facts and ‘unbiased journalism’ with much-needed emotion and critical analysis. It’s more important reading in the 2020s than any kind of ‘why/how to not be racist’ book club book is going to be, and the historical context it provides is as interesting as it is invaluable. The second half drags a bit in going through lengthy trial processes with some assumed baseline knowledge of legalese (which I did not have. All that criminal minds in 2015… meaningless), but aside from that editing and prose are some of the best I’ve seen in nonfiction. 

The Bad

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn A friend and I decided to read this together because I’m obsessed with how insane the author is and wanted to know if he can actually write.

He cannot.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron Barron is an indie darling of the horror fiction scene, so I was excited to finally read one of his collections but can now attest that I hate him. If you’re going to do Lovecraft please deconstruct Lovecraft in an interesting way. I had actually written a lot about the issues I have with how he develops characters and plots, but one of the only shorthand notes I took was “he won’t stop saying ‘bole’ instead of tree trunk” and I feel like that’s the only review we need.

Bats of the Republic by Zach Dodson Look up a photo of this author because if I had bothered to glance at the jacket bio I honest-to-god wouldn’t have even tried reading this.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone I went in with high expectations since this is an epistolary novella I’d seen praised on tumblr and youtube but oh my god was there a reason I was seeing it praised on tumblr and youtube. This is bad Steven Universe fanfiction. Both authors included ‘listening to the Steven Universe soundtrack throughout’ in the acknowledgements, and to add insult to injury there’s a plug from my nemesis Madeline Miller.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton The premise of this one plays with so many tropes I like that I should have been more suspicious. It’s a dinner party with stock characters one would expect of Clue, and rather than our protagonist being the detective he’s a man with amnesia stuck in a 24-hour time loop. Body-hopping between guests, he must gather evidence using the skillsets of each ‘host’ until he either solves Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder or the limit of eight hosts runs out. I read a lot of not-very-good books, and it’s so, so much worse when they have potential to be fun. This is how you lose the most points, and how I abandon decorum and end up writing a list of grievances: • Our protagonist can only inhabit male hosts, which I think is a stupid writing decision not because I’m ‘woke’ but because wouldn’t it make sense for him to also be working with the maids, cooks, and women close to the murder victim? • Complaining about the limitations of hosts makes some sense (e.g- there’s a section where he thinks that it’s hard to be an old man because it’s difficult to get to the places he needs to be quickly), but one of his hosts is a rapist and one of his hosts is fat. Guess which one gets complained about more. • One of the later hosts is just straight-up a cop with cop knowledge that singlehandedly solves the case. We spend some time being like ‘wow I couldn’t have done it without the info all eight hosts helped gather’ but it was 100% the detective and he solves the murder using information he got off-screen. • The mystery itself is actually well-paced and I didn’t have a lot of issues with it (e.g, there’s a twist that I guessed only shortly before the end), which makes it all the worse that the metanarrative of this book is INSANE. No spoilers but the reveal as to why our unnamed protagonist is even in this situation is stupid. I just know they’re going to make it into a movie and I’m preemptively going to aaaaaaaaa!!!

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi The fact that this was the worst book I read all year, worse even than the bad Steven Universe fanfiction, and it won multiple awards makes my blood boil. I could rant about it for hours but just know that it’s a former theater kid’s take on perception and memory, and deals with sexual abuse in a way that’s handled both very badly and with a level of fake deepness that’s laughable. Select fake-deep quotes I copied down because at one point I said ‘oh barf’ aloud: -I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion. It’s sad the same way. -[On a friendship ending] We almost never know what we know until after we know it. -Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.

There are also bad sex scenes that I can’t quite make fun of because I think (HOPE?) they’re supposed to be a melodramatic take on how teenagers view sex, but I very much wanted to die. Flowers were alluded to. Nipples were compared to diamonds.

Honorable/Dishonorable Mentions (categorized as the same thing because, well,)

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North This book was frustrating because the first third of it is fantastic. It’s set up to be a takedown of the manic pixie dream girl trope, jumping from person to person discussing their relationship with the titular Sophie, and indirectly revealing that she was just some girl and not the difficult and mysterious genius they all believed her to be. Then in the third act, BAM! She was that difficult and mysterious genius and she’s now indirectly brought all the people from her past together. I wanted to scream the plot beefed it so bad, but the good news is I really liked this octopus description.

It was the size of a three-year-old child, and it seemed awful to me that something could be so far from human and obviously want something as badly as it wanted to get out of the tank.

Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore Cool new nightmare speedrun strat is to hear a 2-second anecdote from a documentary that people used to get radium poisoning from painting watch faces, be curious enough that you buy a book to learn more, and be met with medical and legal horror beyond anything you could have imagined. This was almost one of my favorite books of the year! Almost.

Radium Girls is very lovingly crafted and incredibly well-researched; one of those things that’s hard to get through but that you want to read sections of again as soon as you’ve finished. The umbrage I take with it is that it’s very Catholic. The author and many of her subjects are Irish and their religion is important to them, but it casts a martyr-y narrative over the whole thing that I found uncomfortable. Seventeen-year-old girls taking a factory job they didn’t know was dangerous are framed as brave, working-class heroes, but there’s not a set moral lesson to be gained from this story. Sarah Maillefer didn’t make “a sacrifice” when she agreed to the first radium tests, she agreed because she was terrified. She didn’t think she was helping she was begging for help.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing Tsing is an incredibly skilled researcher and ethnographer; there are so many good ideas in this book that I’d almost consider it essential leftist text… if I could stand the way it was structured. Tsing posits that because nature is built on precariousness she will build her book the same way, allowing it to grow like a mushroom, and thus chapters don’t progress linearly and are written more like freeform poetry than a series of academic arguments. Some people are really going to love that, but I’m me and a mushroom is a mushroom and a book is a book. I don’t think in the way Tsing does, and while I tried to keep an open mind it’s hard to play along when something is this academically dense and makes so many ambitious claims. As if to prove how different our structuring methods are, I’ve made my own thoughts into a pros and cons list

Things I liked: • ‘Contamination’ as something inherent to diversity • ‘Scalability’ as a flawed way of thinking (Tsing has written whole essays about this that I find very compelling, but a main example here is that China and the US have come down on Japanese matsutake research for being too ‘site specific’ and not yielding enough empirical data) • Discussing how Americans were so invested in self-regulating systems in the 1950s we thought they could be applied to literally everything, including ecosystems • “The survivors of war remind us of the bodies they climbed over- or shot- to get to us. We don’t know whether to love or hate the survivors. Simple moral judgements don’t come to hand.” • Any and all fieldwork Tsing shares is amazing; I especially liked reading about the culture of mushroom pickers living in the Cascades and their contained market system

Things I didn’t like: • Statements that sound deep but aren’t, e.g- “help is always in the service of another.” (Yep. That’s what that means. Unless an organism is doing something to help itself which then nullifies your whole opening argument.) • A very debatable definition of utilitarianism • “Capitalism vs pre-capitalism,” which seems like an insanely black-and-white stance for a book all about finding hidden middle ground • A chapter I found really interesting about how intertwined Japanese and American economies are, but it tries to cover the entire history of US-Japan relations. Seriously, starting with Governor Perry and continuing through present day, this could have been a whole different book and it’s a good example of what I mean when I say arguments feel too scattered (the conclusion it reaches is that in the 80s the yen was finally able to hold its own against the dollar. Just explain that part.) • A chapter arguing that ‘true biological mutualism’ is rarely a focus of STEM and is a new sociological development/way of thinking which is just… flat-out not true

For all the comparisons art gets to ‘being on a drug trip’ this anthropology textbook has come the closest for me. Moments of profound human wisdom, intercut with things I had trouble understanding because I wasn’t on the same wavelength, intercut with even more things that felt false or irrelevant. I can’t put it on the nice list but I am glad I read it.

[atomicpen]

Self-Rec Challenge

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers.

tagged by: @faejilly

tagging: @tarysande, @ladyarrowhead, @shadoedseptmbr, @probablylostrightnow, @indigorally and ANYONE else who wants to do this

Nameless Thing: Respects This is the final installation in a three-part story, but it stands alone and is arguably the best of them. Set many years after the events of DA2, Sebastian reflects on Hawke and is surprised by an unexpected visitor. (minor AU regarding death rites) -- Looking beyond the very non-Andrastian burials, this is one of my very favorite fics I have written to this day. 

In Light of Day, In Dark of Night An epistolary fic co-written by @felspar-blog. Igraine Cousland and Sebastian Vael have been cursed by one jealous of them and their love, and with the help of tenuous friends, seek to break it. (Ladyhawke AU) (unfinished) -- Completely unplanned, originally written via tumblr reblogs, I love love love this pairing and this AU to death. One day Fel and I will figure out the best way to end this, but it also still kind of works as a cliffhanger (if you know the movie and how that ends, I suppose).

Lie Through your Wolfteeth All Marcus wanted was to find the cure for his brother-in-arms and keep things simple. But nothing ever turns out the way it’s supposed to, does it? (FFIX by way of a minor character with brief interludes into other POVs) (in-progress) -- Most of my current favorite writings are all WIPs (because work is a stressful and consuming thing), but if that doesn’t daunt you, this is 100% a story I am in love with for so many reasons--being able to explore Marcus more in-depth, “adultifying” the dialogue and motivations more than they were in-game, and the fact that I singlehandedly created a rarepair ship, just to name a few.

Clemency Spawned by a larger A:tLA fic, this is a short one-shot look into the confrontation in the episode The Southern Raiders (s3e16) from Yon Rha’s POV. Completely unplanned, but I had some thoughts that came out from his perspective, and they immediately spooled out into this one-shot.

I’ll also steal what Jilly did and make an honorable mention to my series Wings Straight and Swift Will Bring Us Home, particularly parts 1-5, which are the more or less a chronological organizing of my 100 Days of Sebastian Vael writing challenge. Some are directly connected to others, but the majority of them are loosely connected standalones.