#I don't remember what I tag these as. I make genre based interactive fiction and I think it's neat

[heart-forge]

The Distant Sound of Dancing

Attend a ball with Commander Abeni, or more accurately, attend to a dark and quiet place to people watch because you've both had enough of schmoozing.

Happy March! I'm crawling out of a crater in the ground to get this to you, but I did it and good for me. Thank-you for your support 🙏

Support me on Ko-fi to access to early access to updates of my interactive fiction projects Manor Hill, Bad Ritual, and Hybrid, as well as monthly drabbles featuring the LIs just like this one! And check out my page on itch.io for various one shots and longer projects!

[gatalentan]

We love and support your AvaMel side but I always laugh when I see something about them bc I remember that Janelle’s tweet 🤣🤣

Ok so for those who don't know, Janelle got tagged in an AvaMel ship fanvid, and replied to one of the quote retweets on that fanvid. I've censored op here for privacy:

Two things can be true:

1. Janelle is allowed to be weirded out by being tagged/seeing ship content. That's her face & those are her co-workers. She's a very private person who mostly keeps fans at arms-length and that's healthy. Ava isn't Janelle, but she has her face (and so does Lisa), so fanvids in particular when accompanied by an explicit caption I can imagine would be really weird to see. As fans we know the diff between real-person and fictional shipping but from her perspective you can see how that would be more nuanced and complicated. Unfortunately, the Twitter algorithm now puts stuff on your feed - regardless of if you follow them or not - based on how it has pigeonholed you, and as a person who sometimes tweets about Abbott/Ava because it's her job, the algo assumes shes a fan and dishes up Abbott fandom content to her whether she likes it or not, so she sees stuff she doesn't wanna see even if she isn't tagged; she wasn't tagged in that QRT, but she still saw it, so we can see that's what happened here. A big problem there is that seeing stuff that makes them uncomfortable can make actors change how they approach the character(s) in future which sucks for everyone. We can't control the algo but on the whole it's better to not try and expose actors to ship content as much as possible because there's scores of ships where the actors became hostile to shippers as a result of being repeatedly exposed to content they don't want to see, or even just getting fatigued by an unintended ship overshadowing the rest of their acting effort. Unfortunately social media giving a lot of access to celebrities is a very double edged sword and difficult to balance, especially when some actors (cough lisa cough) are so far over the line of what's considered normal fan interactions that it gives unrealistic expectations for celebrities that are more private. Actors aren't your best friends, they don't owe you interactions or unconditional support just because you're a fan, they're strangers and real people with their own thoughts and feelings. Everyone has their own limits and boundaries and are allowed to express that and they're entitled to not be comfortable with fan work that uses their image.

2. Actors/creators not supporting a ship doesn't mean we still shouldn't be allowed to play in the sandbox. Work Wives isn't gonna be canon either, but that's not going to stop me from enjoying it. I'm 32 and if I didn't ship stuff just because it didn't have creator support I'd have spent twenty years with nothing to ship at all. As queers we have to carve our own space out where we can see people like us and make a meal out of scraps because otherwise we wouldn't get to engage with media the same way cishet people take for granted. Unless a show is Queer™️, a vehicle for a character's queerness and a major topic of discussion, we rarely get canon queer characters, let alone characters where it's treated respectfully without one of the pair getting fridged or dying. Even The L Word, Queer™️ as it was, killed off one of a major pairing. We deserve to see ourselves across the whole spectrum of genres, not just in Queer™️ TV, but it simply isn't there, so we make it for ourselves in fanwork. In fanwork you can play with these characters however you want. You can give them a soft landing where they're safe (or the opposite, explore darker themes for a light-hearted show). You can give them the type of stories that would never have the space to breathe in the works they came from. You can take them out of their environment completely and put them somewhere else, you can change one thing that changes their whole dynamic, or you can just write absolute filth. Either way, fundamentally they're fictional characters, they do not exist and they don't have free will, only what you put into them as a viewer. We're not about to make Janelle make out with Lisa, but in fiction, Ava and Mel can, and as fictional characters they represent a dynamic we don't see a ton of with two older women, not teenagers/young adults which is the predominant type of representation we get for WLW in TV. So I'm gonna keep shipping AvaMel, I'm just, y'know. Not gonna put it where Janelle might see it. Easy.

Some good vids on this topic: Is Shipping Gay Culture? (James Somerton) | Artists & Fandoms (Philosophy Tube) | Parasocial Relationships: Strangers Aren't Your Friends (Naomi Cannibal) | An Exhaustive Defense of Fanfiction (Sarah Z) | Why We Ship Characters (The Take)

[terramythos]

TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 1 of 26

Title: Annihilation (The Southern Reach #1) (2014) - REREAD

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Genre/Tags: Horror, Science Fiction, Ecological Horror, Cosmic Horror, Weird, First-Person, Unreliable Narrator, Female Protagonist

Rating: 10/10

Date Began: 1/01/2021

Date Finished: 1/05/2021

Along an isolated stretch of coast lies Area X, a pristine wilderness which appeared decades ago and decimated all human civilization within its borders. The only people to enter since have been official expeditions overseen by the mysterious Southern Reach. Annihilation follows the twelfth expedition, an all-female party of four including a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a biologist.

The biologist has a secret; her husband was a member of the doomed eleventh expedition. He returned a shell of his former self before being quarantined and suddenly dying of systemic cancer. She seeks answers for what happened to him. But after the party discovers a strange underground staircase with a manic sermon written along the wall, she soon finds herself infected by Area X itself.

I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time... 

Full review, some spoilers, and content warning(s) under the cut.

Content warnings for the book: graphic violence and gore. Lots (LOTS) of body horror. Some non graphic sexual content. Mind control/hypnotic suggestion is a plot point, but there's an implication it goes beyond that. There's a pervasive sense of unreality. 

Part of me wishes I could read this book, and series, for the first time again. Annihilation is a short read with a weird, disturbing horror story at its core. Area X feels vibrant and alive in creepy ways, and the mental effect it has on the few human characters is profound. It's basically a peaceful nature preserve, but there's something deeply unsettling about the state of decay, oddly aware creatures, pervasive sense of being watched, and how it twists the minds of the characters. The biologist's asocial view of the world colors how she interacts with the setting and the conclusions she draws about Area X, The Southern Reach, the Tower, the lighthouse, and everything in between. The result is an eerie story with a scientific, almost clinical narrator experiencing something beyond human understanding.

But only parts of the overall mystery surrounding Area X are solved in Annihilation; there is an explanation, there are enough hints to figure it out, but good fucking luck. You learn there's some kind of conspiracy and shady shit going on, and the biologist gets some things right... but also some things wrong. This is either infuriating or enough of a tease to encourage one to read the rest of the series (back in 2015, I was the latter). While Annihilation is self-contained, it leaves more questions than answers.

On a reread, everything is different. One thing I admire about VanderMeer is how he integrates hints and foreshadowing without making them too obvious; something I noticed with his Ambergris series as well. In Annihilation, some of this is thematic stuff that doesn't pay off until later books ("desolation tries to colonize you"). Sometimes the biologist draws the right conclusion for the wrong reasons (everything about the psychologist and how she seems burdened). Or some things are way more horrifying with later information (why the moaning creature is Like That even though the dolphins and other animals are almost normal).

Probably my favorite example, though, is eight pages in, the biologist mentions a weird vision she had. It's a throwaway line; just one of a dozen examples on how Area X affects the mind. With later knowledge, though, it's literally foreshadowing the biologist's fate in the final book, Acceptance. You can piece together later bits within Annihilation to see how significant this moment is, but I don't think most will. And there's just tons of stuff like that that doesn't come off as important, but is a little treat for anyone rereading the story.

I guess what I'm saying here is that as much as I like the base story of Annihilation, it's better in many ways on a reread. I wish I could remember my original impressions, because now they're inextricably affected by my knowledge of what happens later in the series. I know that the mystery of it all enthralled me, but I also know lots of people drop the first book due to a lack of concrete answers. If I were to read it again for the first time, who would I be?

Besides that, something I like about this book is the gradual dissemination of information. We start in the thick of Area X and the doomed twelfth expedition, but there are several sequences where the biologist will reflect on her past and her relationship to her husband, which add context to everything else. It's just a structural choice, but one I personally like; it makes her backstory relevant without detracting from the horror or killing the pacing. I like the glimpses of her “ordinary” life and how it juxtaposes/complements the bizarre nature of Area X. 

And the horror factor is just on point. VanderMeer really shines when writing horror because everything just feels... off. Something terrible is happening, but a lot of it is psychological or just out of reach. And when the creepiness is more overt (i.e meeting The Crawler), it's great, jarring cosmic horror.  Lighthouses are a special interest of mine, so I love seeing a horror story with one as a focal point (so to speak). I dig how Area X feels like a character in the story; the mark of a good setting, especially in horror.   

To me Annihilation is a comfort read despite being a disturbing horror story. I like seeing all the moving parts and knowing how it works, and it's a very short novel compared to Authority and Acceptance. I highly recommend this series if you're looking for a creepy, cerebral story which uses nature as the backbone for cosmic horror. For those who have seen the movie, it's a much different story with a similar tone, so if you wanted more... good news! Read the books! But they're also pretty weird and sometimes dense reads, so not for everyone.

I'll be rereading Authority next, which I remember is longer with slower pacing. Let's see how it goes!