#chef's recommendations

[kitschykitchen]

👩🏾‍🍳Chef's Recommendation: If You Liked Baby Reindeer

I recently finished watching Baby Reindeer on Netflix and I am absolutely in love with the story. Without giving too much detail, because I encourage those who can watch it for themselves to do so (trigger warnings for depictions of sexual assault, sexual violence, homophobia, and transphobia), the story is a riveting dark comedy that explores the topics above with depth and empathy that can only be done by someone close to the matter. The story is autobiographical, based on the real events of Richard Gadd's experience of being stalked. For those who don't want to watch the show but are curious, read this article for a more distanced examination.

For those who have watched Baby Reindeer and enjoyed the story, here are a few other media recommendations with similar vibes!

Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi: It's no secret that I loved this book, plus the subject matters overlapped a lot. Donny reminded me a bit of Jayne in some ways as both protagonists struggle with self-hatred and indulge in self-destructive behaviors because of their troubled pasts. It's a great examination of character work and reminds you how a protagonist does not always mean a morally good person. If you'd like a more in-depth overview of Yolk, you can check out my review on my blog.

Russian Doll dir. Leslye Headland: Both Baby Reindeer and Russian Doll lean into the dark comedy genre while simultaneously gut-punching you with their intense examinations of flawed characters. Natasha Lyonne is such a stunning actress and carries the story. The cinematography is also gorgeous and works to add to the kitschy and off-kilter vibe. Season 2 left more to be desired so I recommend Season 1 for those who want to watch. You can stream it on Netflix but I recommend checking trigger warnings for this too.

Underneath by Lily Hoang: This is a novel that I don't plan on reviewing here but I read it two years ago. I stumbled upon it at a writing conference and was intrigued by the back blurb--an overweight woman, overwhelmed by her husband's lack of love and her abusive childhood, decides to kill her children by smothering them under her body. While the book was a bit too overwhelming for my taste, I still think it has merit as a strong look at morally grey characters and examining generational trauma. It dips into the psychological: blending poetry and prose, switching points of view, and jumping through time. I recommend Underneath to anyone who enjoys darker stories and can stomach the grotesque.

The Tatami Galaxy dir. Masaaki Yuasa: I'm sure no one expected to see an anime on this list but this is one that more people need to watch. I was first entranced by The Tatami Galaxy after seeing gifsets of it on Tumblr. The art style is gorgeous and the animation matches the style. It's another psychological show focused on following a nameless protagonist who goes through the world with rose-tinted glasses but gets surprised when things do not go the way he expected. The writers examine his interiority, forcing the protagonist to question why he denies himself happiness and keeps running away from what he wants. I highly recommend it to anyone who can sit through animations! You can stream it on Crunchyroll if you have an account.

[hypogryffin]

early game reload is reawakening all those warm-and-fuzzys for the og trio in me

[ghost-recs]

Oikawa SMAU Rec

nonsense by @idlerin

synopsis: university student, chaotic friend group, and up and coming actor/model oikawa tooru as your secret ex, what could go wrong?

the perfect combination of angst, cuteness, and humor that left me a puddle for oikawa tooru (i highly recommend the playlist too, pls pls).

syrup by @eggyrocks

synopsis: oikawa, to put it bluntly, is love sick. unfortunately, there is a bit of an obstacle in the way of his happy ever after with you...

lots of crack and chaos. humor that has me going. [ongoing...]

pose for me by @authentictiramis

synopsis: vlogging au where two groups decide to collab, simping ensues.

short and sweet, full of fluff and some humor. cute!

[championsandheroes]

It was sweet that Astarion was under the belief that no one would figure out he was a vampire before his big reveal. Most of us took one look at him and said "yep, that sure is a vampire right there." Most, however, doesn't include the party members. Some of these characters are supposed to be perceptive and intelligent, and I'm still convinced that if you press your ear against theirs you'd hear elevator music.

Over at Patreon, society6, and redbubble we don't let intellect devourers starve.

[potatodotpng]

Commissioned Art of Danny From Alien Boys!

[usertoxicyaoi]

"This one's interesting. Let me know what you think after."

MY PERSONAL WEATHERMAN (2023). Episode 6.

[daily-ethoslab]

[608] Heres a scavenger hunt! Try to find the album that inspired the colors of this etho! Hint: the name of the author is on the shirt :^P

[crystallizedtwilight]

Katakuri’s lashes look luxurious!!!

pretty (16.7 ft tall) boy ✨

[el-ffej]

WORD.

[anxietyfluffy]

SO i have been working on this for a lil bit BUT this is an artwork based on @appleflavoredkitkats's amazing fanfiction 'a mini ontology'!!! it is genuinely so good i recommend reading it!!

[inbabylontheywept]

Someone had to go first.

In an odd first, I forgot to post this HFY story here until after it was voiced by BirbletonVA. Their channel actually did such an insanely good job that I would actually strongly recommend listening to it over reading it. Nonetheless, the text is provided below.

Please like and subscribe to their channel if you like their work.

The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, and told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.

“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”

“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.

“I did,” he said. “But someone had to go first.”

That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.

“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”

I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.

“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”

I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.

“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”

I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.

---

Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.

After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.

He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.

The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now. That was an eternity during a siege.

The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, burning trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine, should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.

Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.

A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:

Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.

Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s dueterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned through orbit.

The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to kill the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and got burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, traded as the cost of moving the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.

---

The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.

It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.

Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.

“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-

“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry. If there’s one thing you can trust, it’s that this bird is going to come down gentle.”

He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.

I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.

But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.

I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.

“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”

“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”

I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough as it was.

---

The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside, and to say it was gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.

“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.

“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.

We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.

“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.

“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”

“Good,” he said.

I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.

It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.

[massivementalitynut]

My Youngblood Couple Comm from @mypillowpaper

[hypogryffin]

a lesson in façades

[foolishstepladder]

Just watched a two hour video analysis on Franziska’s character and I always love when video analyses draw out parallels I’ve never seen before… but also WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S PARALLELS BETWEEN TURNABOUT BIG TOP AND PHOENIX, MILES, AND FRANZISKA’S ARCS IN JFA

DON’T MAKE ME LOOK AT THAT CASE WITH A CRITICAL LENS DONT MAKE ME THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT 😭😭😭

[allboutheyaoi]

Did you see about the Tadaima, Okaeri anime??? I’m sure you did… what are your thoughts? I’ve been rereading after a long time and falling right back in love with all of them… They’re perfect honestly >.<

YES I DID!!! I can't believe we're getting a BL OMEGAVERSE animated in real time. We've come so far my loves. I'm genuinely looking forward to its release in April this year. This might actually be a breakthrough for more omegaverse BL to be animated in the future. (*wink wink* Kashikomarimashita, Destiny one day perhaps)

Meanwhile, I've been rewatching Sasaki to Miyano again and god it made me missed watching BLs. I know Cherry Magic is currently airing and it looks fabulous. But I'm waiting for all episodes to be out so I can binge watch them!

[taryo88]

An incredibly strong, competent woman and the opossum she met in an alley who somehow keeps showing up on her doorstep ✨ Genuinely their friendship was one of my favorite parts (of many favorite parts) of Running Close to the Wind by @ariaste , so I had to draw them IMMEDIATELY