#I'm reading a really fucking good book y'all. it's like 100 pages and very tiny PLEASE look it up

[nothorses]

"It doesn't make sense to say "believe all survivors" if we don't also remember that most of us are survivors, which includes most people who cause harm. What we mean is we are tired of being silenced, dismissed, powerless in our pain, hurt over and over. Yes. But being loud is different from being whole, or even being heard, being cared for, being comforted, being healed. Being able to destroy is different from being able to generate a future where harm isn't happening all around us."

- Adrienne Maree Brown, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

[sometimes-love-is-enough]

HiIII II min, what are you reading/watching/listening to at the moment, i need recs

QUITE A LOT. i am reading and watching and playing and listening to. A LOT. I'm kind of astounded that I'm actually doing all this at once, but here we go -

Books:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - y'all already know what this one is about. I'm here to tell you that it's brilliantly done with a genuinely engaging writing voice and style, and a terrifyingly good unreliable narrator. If you're up to stomaching the obvious pedophilia, I fully recommend it.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville - slightly racist biologically inaccurate whale hunting. For people who know nothing about whales. I've been on a classics kick recently, I'm trying to get my way through a lot of the big 'classic' books and this is what feels like the final boss. It's good, but it's dense as all fuck, and I'm struggling despite being very close to the end with it. I don't recommend this one quite as much, but it's good enough for me to stick with it.

Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz - this is the Disco Elysium novel, translated from Estonian by a variety of lovely people. It's good, but it's also pretty dense - maybe not as much as Moby Dick, but it makes it hard to read in large chunks. I'm reading it alongside my beloved @lifewithoutrainydays, and i really need to put more time into it.

S. by Doug Dorst - fucking fascinating book. It's presented as a book called 'Ship of Theseus' by an author that doesn't exist, and it looks and feels like an actual old library book, complete with scribblings in the margins (that form a whole other meta story on top of the book itself), postcards and printouts jammed in between the pages, and an old library label on the spine. Still trying to figure out how to read it, but plucking away at it in-between all my other endeavors.

Our Bloody Pearl by D.N. Bryn - a.k.a., me trying to step out of my comfort zone and read some recommendations, and not quite clicking with it. Found family pirate-siren trauma-recovery story. I like the things being done with communication difficulties, but on the whole it feels a bit too fanfiction-y, which is not something I tend to like in my original fiction. I'd recommend it if you're a fan of that sort of thing, though!

Comics:

Awful Hospital: Seriously the Worst Ever by Bogleech - the author says they've never read Homestuck. I don't know if I believe them. A glorious gruesome surreal hellish trip through a very very bad hospital, seriously the worst ever, and beyond! I'm pretty early on but enjoying the fuck out of it. I don't know where it's going and I'm scared to find out.

Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise by Tradd Moore - I read this ages ago, but finally have it in printed edition, and that rules because everything about this FUCKS SEVERELY. the art style is unhinged and brilliant, the writing is weird and beautiful, and the plot is........ the weirdest thing Doctor Strange comics have ever done since Into Shamballa, actually. i'm taking it slow this time because i want to savor every panel.

The Apothecary Diaries (manga edition) - this has been on pause for a bit, because everything else I was reading distracted me, but it's good and it's open in another tab right now, so I'll include it. Murder mysteries in an ancient Chinese court, starring the weirdest poison-obsessed apothecary girl who has ever existed. She poisons herself for fun and gets excited over particularly deadly toxins, I love her to death.

Games:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - I loved the books and the show, so I figured it was about time to actually play the games. I'm a tiny bit addicted to it at this point. It's a good fucking game. I like killing monsters and I like playing Fantasy Magic The Gathering and i really really like the battle music. I'm 100%ing this one or I'm dying in the process.

Lobotomy Corporation - has fallen a bit by the wayside because of the Witcher, whoops, but I do fully intend to get back to it at some point. I know there's some less-than-great stuff going on vis-a-vis the creators, but I'm not really engaging on that level. I'm just enjoying it as an SCP-like creature-management simulator. There's some very fun anomalies with very fun writeups in this one, and I enjoy the mental challenge of figuring out what makes them all tick.

Listening to:

Critical Role, Campaign Three - I'm not utterly obsessed with it, but it's a nice long chunk of listening for me to get my evening routine done to the sound of.

And on my podcast 'I'm all caught up, but I regularly listen when new episodes come out' list are: The Magnus Protocol, Dungeons and Daddies, The Adventure Zone, and Apocrypals.

Watching:

The X-Files - all of it, start-to-finish, because I have somehow managed to avoid all spoilers of a sci-fi cultural touchstone all this time, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. I love some fucked-up monster-of-the-week sci-fi.