#anni's birthday smush party

[daydreamstew]

waves of you | 3.1k | e

They’d woken that morning, well, really in the early afternoon, tangled up in her torn apart bedsheets smelling like sex and feeling like shit. Elizabeth being Elizabeth, she’d gone into her fixer mode and ordered in some greasy, diner breakfast food from one of the delivery apps and forced them both to chug about a gallon of water as they waited for Chad the delivery driver.

With food in their stomachs, they’d popped some extra strength pain meds and her plan of action was complete. They were supposed to feel better. Be cured.

But here they are splayed out on her bright as the sun sectional, unable to muster up the energy to do anything.

“Mmm I’m gonna kill Annie,” Elizabeth moans.

“Me too,” he agrees, barely audible with his face smushed against the couch.

He’s not sure what the kid put in her punch, but that shit was lethal.

or, beth and rio are hungover and horny after annie’s 21st birthday party

read the rest on ao3

[brigdh]

Continuing to catch up on book reviews

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey. Around 1910, a US congressman proposed to import hippos into the southern states as meat animals (supposedly "lake cow bacon" was delicious). Obviously this never happened, but Gailey has written a novella set in the world where it did. In her 1890s, an enormous stretch of the Mississippi River has been dammed to create a shallow marsh in response to the hippo ranching boom; unfortunately this marsh is now overrun with feral, man-eating, escaped hippos who have turned the area into a lawless danger zone. Winslow Houndstooth, former hippo breeder and current mercenary, is hired by federal agents to clear out the ferals and return the marshlands to government control. He promptly gathers the crew he needs to pull off the job. River of Teeth follows typical heist-movie structure: the long opening sequence of assembling the team, each with their own speciality; the suspense of putting together a plan and setting the pieces in motion; and finally the actual heist, which of course goes wrong in several unexpected ways, adding new and exciting twists to the plot. It's a structure refined to perfection by the Ocean's movies, and Gailey follows it faithfully. Except that this heist takes place in a Wild West where the cowboys all ride hippos. There are even different breeds of hippos, selected for size or speed or fighting ability, and given the same sort of loving descriptions and characterizations as any fiery stallion or faithful steed in a traditional Western. How can you not love this? I also appreciated the clear attention to diversity in the cast. There's Winslow himself, a bisexual Korean-British man giving to flirting and sleeping with anyone who catches his eye; Regina "Archie" Archambault, a fat Frenchwoman who's a skilled conman and pickpocket; Hero Shackleby, black non-binary demolitions expert who has to be coaxed out of retirement for one last job; Adelia Reyes, described as "without question, the deadliest, most ruthless contract killer of her day" and also a Latina woman who's eight months pregnant; and finally Cal Hotchkiss, inside man and literally the token white guy – Winslow explains that they need someone with privilege for part of the plan. Unfortunately, despite all of the amazing rule-of-cool in the above paragraphs, I didn't much like River of Teeth. This is Gailey's first full-length piece of writing (she'd published short stories before) and it shows. The biggest problem is simply that it's a novella packed with a plot that desperately needed to be at least a novel, and the smushing and cramming required to fit it all into such a small space did a great deal of damage. We're told, for example, that Winslow and Hero fall in love, but this takes place pretty much entirely off-page and we're given no explanation for Winslow's sudden transition from one-night-stands to devoted commitment. That kind of character arc really needs room to breathe if it's going to be believable. In addition, there are several betrayals and shocking double-crosses, but they all come so quickly one after another and we know so little about the characters in question that there's no emotional weight to any of them. Finally, there were some mistakes in the worldbuilding, the biggest of which was the fact that the dam that created this new marshland was upriver of the marsh. That's... that's not how dams work. Right? I'm now second-guessing myself because I can't find anyone else complaining about it online, but it bugged me through every single page of this short novella. Literally every page, because it was on a map included before the story started, so I was already confused before I'd read one word. I'm sad that I didn't like River of Teeth, because I expected to; it's such an incredibly cool concept and bit of history. But the execution just didn't hold up to the idea, alas. Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey. The sixth book in The Expanse series, and the first one to be almost entirely free of alien plot devices (though they do show up for a spectacular ending, well-foreshadowed and still totally surprising). Humanity in this future is divided into three groups: those who live on Earth, those who live on Mars, and 'Belters', those who live in the asteroid belt and beyond. Earth and Mars have been the superpowers dominating the solar system, while the Belters suffer under heavy taxes, tariffs, and fees for importing water, gravity, air, food, etc. At least, that's how it was until the previous book, when a small group of Belter terrorists/freedom fighters (depending on your point of view, as the old joke goes) diverted asteroids into colliding with Earth, killing billions and rendering most of the planet uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. They also infiltrated the Martian military (leaving its government to fester in infighting and backbiting and eventually to collapse into a constitutional crisis) as well as barring any entry to or exit from our solar system, thus cutting off potential resources that could be used to aid Earth's or Mars's citizens. That was Nemesis Games. Babylon's Ashes is the fallout. The Belter terrorist group unsurprisingly begins to falter as its component small segments follow divergent goals, a problem heightened when Michio Pa, the main military commander, realizes that unless everyone stops fighting and immediately focuses on rebuilding infrastructure, all of humanity is going to starve to death in a few years. Her solution is to rebrand herself as a pirate queen, capturing necessary resources and delivering them to those most in need, a move that pits her against both her former terrorist allies and the newly forming Earth/Mars/some of the Belt coalition. Meanwhile, Filip, the seventeen year old only son of Marco, the terrorist leader, is slowly coming to realize that his father is maybe not that great of a guy, but is instead an unreliable, short-sighted narcissist who happens to be blessed with immense charisma. There's a lot of good stuff in this book. Unfortunately, there's also nineteen goddamn POVs, a simply ridiculous number. It's the first time in this series that I struggled to remember who was who, which is never a good sign. Some of the POVs are ones we've seen before (Holden, Naomi, Amos, Alex, Avasarala, Prax, Bobbie, Anna, Clarissa), some were previously minor characters now upgraded to narrators (Namono, Anna's wife; Dawes, governor of Ceres, largest city in the Belt; Fred, political leader of the centrist Belters; and the previously mentioned Pa, Filip, and Marco) and some are entirely new (Salis, Jakulski, Vandercaust, and Roberts, all four minor technicians working on Medina Station, which was cut off after Marco sealed the solar system). Nine of these characters only get one chapter each; that's barely enough time to get a sense of them as a personality, much less for them to have a storyline. Of the remaining ten, the only ones who get enough screentime to manage an actual character arc are Filip and maybe Pa. Though to be fair, Filip's arc is an incredibly well-done portrayal of an angry young man from a sheltered background – he doesn't realize it, but he's been indoctrinated in Marco's beliefs since birth – just beginning to question how he was raised. Outside of those two, though, the plot and themes of Babylon's Ashes fall a little flat with no one for the reader to emotionally latch onto. Significant portions of the book feel more like a detailed nonfiction account of a war – lists of places and dates, battle maneuvers and troop movements – than they do a novel. Which is really too bad, because Babylon's Ashes does have worthwhile things to say. I particularly liked the recurrent theme about how war makes it very easy to view our enemies as less than human: We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” “Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.” “And look where it got us,” Holden said. “I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they’d do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway.” “Everybody’s a little naïve sometimes,” Alex said, feeling as the words passed his lips that maybe he wasn’t quite following Holden’s point. Maybe he should have taken the first of the sobriety pills before he’d left the men’s room. “I meant fact,” Holden went on as if he hadn’t heard Alex at all. “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people. Naomi told me that when the rocks fell, the people on Inaros’ ship cheered. They were happy about it.” “Yeah, well.” Alex paused, rubbing a knuckle across his upper lip. “Consider they might all be a bag of assholes.” “They weren’t killing people. In their heads? They were striking a blow for freedom or independence. Or making it right for all the Belter kids that got shitty growth hormones. All the ships that got impounded because they were behind on the registration fees. And it’s just the same back home. Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station. Or if the station manager’s son liked writing poetry. Or that blowing the station meant that Annie down in Pallas central accounting wasn’t going to get to throw her big birthday party after all.” “Annie?” Alex asked. “I made her up. Whoever. The thing is I wasn’t wrong. About telling people the truth? I was right about that. I was wrong about what they needed to know.” There's more, about politics and alliances, small-scale loss and planet-wide grief, protest and authority, and if history is made by sweeping changes in economies and technology or the choices of individuals. It's all meaningful and well-done, but... it's just hard to care without a character who cares. I needed fewer POVs. It's funny how such a minor-seeming stylistic choice can overwhelm so many other positives, but I simply didn't enjoy Babylon's Ashes the way I enjoyed the previous books. Ah, well. At least the next one in the series seems to return to the usual four-ish narrators.

[aaghht]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNI!!!!!!!!! :D :D :D :D

AWW FRANCESCA THANK YOUUUUUUU 8D 8 D

[aaghht]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY

8D 8D 8D 8D 8D 8D AAAAAAAAAA AAAA thank youuuu!!!