#Things that weren't on my 2023 bingo card

[starfleetwitch]

INFERNOVERSE KATE!!! INFERNOVERSE KATE!!! INFERNOVERSE KATE!!!

[actual-changeling]

fun fact while my allergy meds are working very well my voice is a mess for some reason and i currently sound like i've been chain smoking for 20 years

[apricusapollo]

relating taylor swift lyrics to star wars was not in my 2023 bingo card

[firesnap]

He admitted he knew Manatreed that whole fucking time. Like we all knew it was true, and he knew it was true, but him fucking admitting it was not on my 2023 bingo card.

Like, I don't know if people who weren't around then know, but that was a VERY fucking big deal and he VERY much lied that he knew the guy and that the guy wasn't an abuser.

And now it's going to be just another thing brought up in that trainwreck video.

[chicorystreetcoffee]

my personal 2023 bingo card final review!!!

and also my card for 2024

+ i didn't get a bingo, and that's ok! i still hit about half of my items, and the ones i hit hold a lot more weight than the ones i missed.

+ having said that-- i got REALLY CLOSE to that 10-minute mile, and even though it's not on my 2024 card it would still mean a lot to try and get there eventually.

i feel obligated to do it to show teenage-me that being active isn't this dreaded humiliating thing anymore. in fact, it's a lot of fun and we can do so much that we weren't able to before!

+ the big obvious success has been opening the shop and actually selling a thing. like, the fact that i was able to do that caused such a huge shift in how i see myself and what's possible for me if i just dare to try.

+ getting OUTSIDE (like literally outdoors and/or stepping outside of my comfort zone) was also really important this year. whether i was alone or with other people, it turns out that touching grass (or ocean, lake, new grocery store, whatever) does a lot for my sense of, like.......being a real living person that's part of the whole rest of the world....? rather than, like, an alien that's just visiting.......?

+ anyway this is why ~adventure~ is on my 2024 card more than once. the rest of the card is pretty straightforward i think.

+ actually there is NO WAY i'm gonna be able to do a pull up next year. i just think it would be FUCKING COOL if i did. somehow. god do u think i could join a crossfit place in 2025??

[kinetic-elaboration]

January 24: Octavia, Bravery/Fear

Octavia-centric, ~830 words, written in about 30 minutes; cw for references to drug use

For the prompt "bravery and its antonyms (cowardice, timidity, fear, hesitation)" from my July Break Bingo 2023 card (though I sort of forgot about the prompt pretty fast lol)

In the same 'verse as Make a lot of Money and Feel Dead Inside, my Time Loop fic. It's not.. spoiler-y per se, but it might make more sense later.

*

It is not true that Octavia Blake ceased to feel fear at the age of fifteen.

She wanted that story in the last book. The woman, the myth, the legend. Bellamy told her that superheroes weren't relatable, and that all of her adventures would read as boring and slight, if she turned herself into some sort of perfect, fearless goddess. Oh, it would all be too easy then. No stakes, no drama, no reason to care. No one wants to read a book like that, he said.

And even then, maybe that phrasing was just to be polite. Maybe he didn't mean you can't look superhuman but more like you can't look inhuman. And it burned her up that he wasn't wrong. That image they want for the TV screen, girl next door but she climbs mountains for a living, that's not her and never has been. But it's the sort of thing that sells. The relatable thing.

How she'd like to be perceived is like something out of a tall tale, or the over-the-top adventures Bellamy used to tell her as bedtime stories. The characters weren't anything in those; the story was their accomplishments, stacked up against all the dangers they faced.

She can't be a superhero and she can't be too cocky and she can't lie about conquering the very concept of fright when she was just a kid because that self-myth, it sounds so good in her head, but if she spoke it out loud it would prove all too much. She should have been able to vanquish it then: the feeling of her heart pounding in her throat, the nauseous tightening in her stomach, the tickling unease. The dread. Because she'd felt it at its worst and then she'd crushed it in her hands. She'd—

She'd seen everything that she needed to see.

But instead she found the nightmares followed her for years. Maybe she'd come up too close to the monster's face and it had changed her, or maybe she was waiting for the aftermath, the vengeance. Maybe she was taking her cues from her big brother, who sulked around the house all quiet for a while and said that it was mourning. She'd watch his eyes twitch and that tic in his jaw that was always his tell. And it made something sick start to vibrate along her skin. Maybe, like Clarke said, it just takes a while for that stuff to wash over you, her way of saying, there's trauma, and you have to learn the patience to feel it out and through.

What did make it to the book is that she has no patience and never did. To overcome the fear she had to kill it herself. She pushed right up against everything that had ever scared her; she dared, not herself to endure, but the terrifying things to find her, to get her. Horror movie marathons on Friday nights. Sleepovers with Clarke when they took the old Ouija board out and called for spirits. All that other side of the veil shit, she'd always hated it, because it seemed like if it was true, it would be the worst fate of all. She practiced sneaking out of the house even with nowhere to go. She explored the edges of the swamp.

In college, she started hanging out with the two guys down the hall, and on the weekends, after dark, they'd leave campus and go exploring. They tore apart their mid-size university town as if the only things they really had to learn were all its secrets. Jasper was excellent at picking locks. When the security systems were electronic, Monty would fix them. For a while, her favorite sensations were rusting metal fencing cutting into her skin, and the satisfaction of finding purchase in the diamond cutouts with her feet. Sometimes they just sat outside in parking lots they shouldn't be in and smoked Monty's weed. Bellamy would have killed her if she'd gotten high in high school, which is sort of ironic when you really think about it, and at first it scared her, too. She wondered what it would be like, to be not quite herself.

"You'll feel great," Jasper told her, soft and warm, his breath an outtake of cold, misting air and smoke. When he handed her the joint and their fingers touched, it seemed more intimate than the time she'd gotten caught trying to climb one of the fences, and he’d had to shove her upwards with his hands on her ass.

She wanted to cut open her palm, let it bleed like an oath. She wanted to steal just to prove she could. She wanted to jump off a building just to show them all she'd land on her feet.

How had she defeated the worst monster there was, and fear still lingered, tightening up in her throat?

"You okay?" Monty asked her, then, and she swallowed down everything she still didn't know and said yes.

[emmashouldbewriting]

"Sophie being the first member of the brf to visit iraq was not on my bingo card"

Cheering Backgrid on was not on my bingo card. LOL It's been a year of unexpected things.

someone should compile a List Of Things That Weren't On The Royal 2023 Bingo Card™

[average-guy-reviews]

Love Again (2023)

"Mira Ray, who is struggling to cope with the death of her fiancé, unintentionally sends a sequence of romantic messages to his old cell phone number, which has been reassigned to Rob Burns' new work phone. As a journalist, Rob is drawn to the candidness in Mira's beautifully written texts. When he is tasked with writing a feature about the famous singer Celine Dion, he seeks her assistance in finding a way to meet Mira in real life and ultimately win her affection"

It was obvious from the trailers, and all the posters, etc. what this film was going to be. And, after watching, it was everything I expected it to be.

Romantic dramas tend to have a formula they follow, and this was no different. Two people who have never met each other find themselves intertwined through a twist of fate. They start seeing each other and then, after a slice of adversity, they separate. Eventually, after soul searching and promises, they wind up together. If you've ever seen a by the numbers romantic drama you'll know exactly what I mean and how this film went.

That's not to say that this is a bad film, or even that the genre itself is no good. It simply means that it's a story with an outcome you know, and a predictability level off the scales. It just doesn't do anything to make itself stand out from the thousands of its brothers and sisters that have come before it. Except for one thing....

If you've seen the trailers you'll know that Mira, played Priyanka Chopra, is sending messages to her deceased boyfriend as a way to still connect him. Rob Burns, played Sam Heughan, is the guy who now has the number she is sending these messages to. He starts to believe he has feelings for her the more he reads, up to the point he wants to find her and meet her. This is, for me, where the main issue I have with this film begins. The way he decides to meet her is to stalk her favourite opera every night until he runs into her and can start a conversation. That's not right, and all the way through I couldn't get over the creepy nature of this beginning.

Heughan and Chopra both put in decent performances, but they are constrained by the tropes of the story and the genre. That makes it difficult to put in a truly heartfelt performance, and it definitely hamstrung them as actors. Again, that's not to say they were bad. They absolutely weren't, but yet again the roles and performances just don't stand out above the pack. They weren't bad. They just weren't special.

The director and writer, James C. Strouse, has done a decent job with the locations and sets. The film looks gorgeous at times, and the choices made by the director cinematographically are spot on. He hits all the points you'd expect as well story-wise. These include the "unexpected" crossovers where they don't 'see' each other as well as several other. To be fair he does do those pretty well, but honestly you could have a romdram bingo card and get a full house really easily.

It does have a pretty decent soundtrack. This becomes even better of you're a Celine Dion fan. Celine does, of course, have a role in the movie as a very slightly dramatised version of herself. Though I suspect that she was actually fully.just being herself.

Overall, it's not a bad film. It's just nothing outstanding or special. It's certainly not a film I'll be adding to my regular rewatch pile, if I ever watch it again. If I was going to put it up against a romdram I thoroughly enjoyed, that did do something different, and that I have watched several times, it would be Last Christmas starring Emilia Clarke. That's how you do a romantic drama. It's getting a 5.5/10, because it's not bad, but it's barely above the median. If you love romantic dramas you might absolutely love this, and I honestly hope you do.