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oceanpulls · 6 months

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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. “But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

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The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

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Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

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The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

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Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

#my ninposting #my transcription #trent reznor #atticus ross #nin #nine inch nails #trent #reznor #gq

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prince-liest · 2 months

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i know you didn't mean anything bad by it, but it really discouraged me to see you rb that anti-reader-insert post. i write and enjoy both reader-insert and shipfic (my 2016 baby-in-fandom roots were in shipfic, but i'm pretty active in the reader-insert community as well these days). i really look up to you as both a current med student would to a resident (i'm an m2) and a writer would to a more-experienced/established writer, so i guess seeing you agree with a post that disparages a part of the fanfic community that we both engage in made me feel upset.

i definitely understand where people come from when they complain about xreader fics flooding the tags. i've felt that exasperation and annoyance of scrolling through the tags both on ao3 and tumblr, searching for fanart or shipfics of my favorite characters, only to be inundated with reader-insert works that i'm not in the mood to read. so, i get it.

i guess my point is: i look up to you. i really enjoy your writing. and because of my parasocial connection to you (i.e., enjoyment of your fandom takes and writing), it hurt my feelings that you seem to hold a pretty negative opinion about a side of the fandom writing community that i happen to pour a lot of myself into.

please don't feel pressured to respond to this at all-- residency is hard enough without some random anon on the internet nagging at you about some random reblog that is not nearly as important as patient care or saving lives. i don't even really know what the purpose of telling you this was; i'm not trying to change your opinion about reader-insert or anything like that. i think i just wanted to let you know how i felt seeing your reblog, with no expectations that you do anything with that information /gen. but yeah. i hope you're able to get some rest and take some time for yourself soon, and i look forward to continuing to your fics in the future.

Hey, there anon! First of all, it may make you feel better to know that I actually have absolutely nothing against x reader fics at a baseline. It's not my thing, I don't read it, but I don't have enough of an opinion on it to dislike it. I'm a big proponent of "write what you want" and while I've never written x reader content, I've roleplayed plenty of canon x OC ships back in the day, and write a lot of stuff that needs the dead dove tag. This post, to my understanding and in my intent, was meant to express humorous frustration with the ongoing issue specifically of a lot of x reader fics (particularly in the last several months, I suspect either because of Tiktok or due to Twitter's downward spiral) being tagged with irrelevant tags. I've actually had to ask on multiple posts something like "Why is this tagged with [canon ship]?"

Most people have kindly removed the tag and explained that they thought it was good exposure and didn't realize that wasn't how things work on Tumblr, which is great, but it's still frustrating that it's hard to scroll through a lot of tags without seeing lengthy and explicit x reader fics that are either tagged with unrelated ships/characters/fandoms, or undertagged with blockable x reader tags.

Even if I did dislike x reader, though, I just want to emphasize to you: I really appreciate that you look up to me and I'm really happy that I'm able to provide some encouragement to you in the form of someone with a similar creative hobby on the same career path, but also, my opinions on matters of personal taste really don't matter. I am, at the end of the day, A Random Person On The Internet Who Has A Blog, and I encourage you to look at opinions of mine that grate on you and think: "Eh. Just another random person I don't happen to agree with. Whatever, I guess." and move on, because in the long run this will be more fair to both yourself and me. There are indeed actually popular but harmless parts of fandom that I'm growing to dislike a little bit, and it feels strange to be unable to casually refer to or joke about that without being worried that it will hurt someone's feelings that I don't personally like the same thing they do. This is actually some of why I'm on Tumblr and not Twitter - the parasocial issues tend to be stronger on there! I confess that I don't really know exactly what to do about this problem yet, but I'm going to endeavor to not censor myself (as long as I'm not being a dick, ofc) while also encouraging people to not put me up on too much of a pedestal.

At any rate, I'll clarify in the tags of the post what I meant by my reblog, and I hope this at least offered some reassurance to you!

#ask #personal #Anonymous #ll

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thedevilsoftruth · 3 months

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Tomorrow: Shane's Journal

I had this idea for a long time, and that idea was to write 5 journal entries going through important time stamps of Shane's life. These entries are written through the lens of Shane himself, almost as if he actually wrote them. Nothing stated in here is 100% cannon. These are all simply headcanons I have of Shane and his life, and i hope you all enjoy it!

For clarity, I think Stardew takes place in 2016, given that's when it was released, and i also hc Shane to be 35, so he was born in 1981 in this fic. A little bit random, but that's just something to chew on.

Tw: This fic goes over very sensitive topics such as suicide, mentions of self-harm, shootings, depression, alcohol addiction, childhood trauma, and a lot of Atheism.

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September 8th, 1996

Hey god, if you're listening, why are you doing this to me? I've tried and tried and tried all I could, all day, every day. No matter what people threw at me, I still fucking took it because I didn't want to end up being a dead beat like my stupid fucking father. I'm sorry. I'm angry. What's the point of fucking living if everyday I'm in goddamn pain, and If all my nights are spent sleepless as I sob? I've prayed and prayed and prayed for things to get better, but nothing is getting better, and I want to die. The only thing good in my life right now is my gridball team. My parents don't fucking love me, I'm a failure to everyone I know. I'm starting to think this world would be better off without me.

God, please, help me. Guide me to a newfound happiness, please. I can't go on like this anymore. I want to have hope, I need to have hope. It's what Marnie tells me every day. But I can't if things continue to go to shit. Well, im going to lie down now. Tomorrow is a new day... right?

- Shane .H

September 10th, 1996

You're a liar, you're a fucking liar. Screwed up, fucked up, arrogant, selfish liar. I was blind to your lies, deceived by the promised hope of a good life, and yet you took my hope and smashed it against the wall. I hate you. I hate all of you. I want to cut myself and die as I bleed out.

Everyone is turning against me. Ethan wasn't there for me when I told him to stay outside my aunt's house last night. My mother tried to kill me last night, and my father wouldn't dare to bat an eye at me. I don't know what I fucking did to deserve this. Mom hurt Marnie. Everyone was screaming, I felt like my ears were going to bleed. I ran away. Mom tried to throw a knife at me, so I ran away. Ethan got me high before that and was supposed to stay outside of Marnies ranch for me incade anything happened, but he fled afterward.

They had told me they didn't want me at Marnies house anymore when they were gone. But I couldn't stop myself. They hadn't been home in a week, and I needed comfort. They are always fucking gone they are always never home or.... used to not always be home.

I stayed at Micheal's house last night. I went back to Marnie's this morning. My parents killed themselves an hour after I left. They did it in front of Marnie, and she couldn't do anything to stop them. They wouldn't listen to her. Marine is going to be my guardian. We're going to make frequent trips to Zuzu city for our therapy sessions.

I don't think I'll be going back to school. I hate myself. I hate my life. My parents died because of me. I wasn't a good son, I never was. Maybe if I had been better and didn't get high, sneak out, or get bad grades all the time, they would have loved me. But if there's anything I hate the most at the moment other than myself, it's you, God.

- Shane .H

November 27th, 2010

I thought I was getting better. I thought things were going to be okay. I haven't taken therapy since I was 20. I'm gonna need it after today because I'm having the biggest downward spiral since 1996. I started to believe again. I started to read the Bible and pray because things were getting better, but all of this shit coming back to me tells me that there is no God up in the sky. It's a joke. A stupid dumb lie that innocent people like myself get mind-fucked into believing is real. But it's not. It's a load of fucking shit.

God took away everything that I have ever loved in my entire life and hollowed out my soul until I was nothing, and left me with stupid fucking priorities that I can't fucking handle! I didn't want a child. Not now, not ever. This child isn't mine. How am I supposed to fucking provide for her, if I'm working 9 hours a godamn week at a fucking grocery store? Damn it. Damn it all to hell.

One second, I'm at a fair with my two best friends i haven't seen in years who are parents now, the other second they're killed in a shooting and I'm stuck with their fucking kid!

I don't want this, I don't fucking want this at all. Kill me, please, God. I can't even write this with how shaky my fucking hands are. I wish I never crossed paths with Micheal, even if it's been 12 years since I've seen him. I can't do this. I can't go on anymore. Tell me one reason why I shouldn't put a bullet in my head like my fucking parents did?! Fuck you, and fuck your stupid fucking cult, and fuck your beliefs, and fuck it all!!!

- Shane .H

December 23rd, 2016

I love you, Marnie. I love you, Jas. I love you, Michael and Alejandra. I love you, Mom and Dad. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm a failure. All I've ever done to you all was bring you pain. I'm a dead beat. I don't deserve your kindness or your patience. I'm a fat, alcohol addicted, low-life, dick face who's never made any achievement in life. I can't even get myself out of bed in the morning. I black out almost every night from drinking too much. I could never get a good job here in the fucking town.

My life has brought me nothing but pain. Nobody wants someone lin their life who can't even do something as simple as brushing their teeth.. I'm nothing but a mere parasite, eating away at people's lives.

I'm sorry, im sorry, I'm sorry, but today is the day.

You won't have to deal with me anymore, and I can finally be free from this never-ending hell.

Goodbye, world.

- Shane .H

December 23rd, 2018

2 years. I've been sober for 2 years now.

On this day, two years ago, I tried to end my life. I almost drank myself to death, but a farmer noticed me near the cliff and supported me. They brought me to a hospital, and I went back to Zuzu city to try therapy again. It's still embarrassing when I think about it. Those memories don't make me nearly as sad anymore, I just get... kind of embarrassed. It's like... wow, I was like that? What an asshole, hehe.

Well, my sobriety isn't the only thing I'm proud of.

Jas is eight years old now! I finally saved up enough to move out of Marnies and into the city. I got a new job, and I have a cousin here who is watching over Jas during the day after she comes home from school. She has a lot of friends now and is boy crazy... oh dear, I still don't like the thought of that. My hours aren't the best, but it makes me money and keeps a roof over our heads. I work on service tech. I didn't know I liked cars so much, haha! Everyone there is really cool and nice, and it's helped me with coming out of my shell a little bit.

On holidays, me and Jas go back to Stradew Valley to see Marnie. We have frequent calls with her, and I also make sure to pay the farmer a visit. Jas and I bake them cookies as a thanks for literally saving my life. Sometimes she eats them in the car...

Well, anyway, I start work in a little bit. Just wanted to let everything all out. Today is a new day, after all.

- Shane .H

#sdv #stardew #stardew valley #sdv fanfic #stardew valley fanfiction #stardew valley fanfic #shane sdv #sdv shane #shane stardew valley #stardew valley shane #stardew shane #sdv shane fanfic #stardew valley shane fanfic

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meowteefz · 4 months

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hey there . our name is dylan . we are a polyfrag system ( mixed origin . MOSTLY traumagenic . ) and collectively identify as a post-rq cis-angel cis-reincarnation perma17 perma90sdecade polyamourus bi-gay genderqueer being . we use any pronouns , you cant misgender us it's quite literally impossible .

our favorite films: I Saw The TV Glow (2024), The Batman (2022), D!tchm (1999), Bang Bang! You're dead (2002), Black Circle Boys (1997), Natural Born Killers (1994)

our favorite shows: Euphoria (started 2019), South Park (started 1997)

Our favorite games: Postal Redux (2016), DOOM (1993), DOOM 2 (1994), DOOM 64 (1997), OMORI (2020), Class Of 09 (2021)

Albums I have on vinyl: The Downward Spiral (NIN), IGOR (Tyler, the creator), Hit Me Hard And Soft (billie eilish), Pretty Hate Machine (NIN), Saturday Night Wrist (Deftones)

Albums I want to get on vinyl: I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack, With Teeth (NIN)

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herohimbowhore · 10 months

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The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius: An Allegory for Ferrari

Scuderia Ferrari holds the title as the oldest and most successful Formula 1 team, having competed in every season since 1950. Where others fell away, Ferrari has remained.

If you were to ask someone to say something about Ferrari, then there’s a few way it can go.

First, is perhaps the most common. Enzo Ferrari’s famous quote that was probably true for most of us. “Ask a child to draw a car, and certainly he will draw it red.” And Enzo Ferrari was correct. The first thought when asked about a red car or more specifically, a red sports car, is Ferrari. (And Lightning McQueen)

Then, maybe another well-known quote will come to mind. “Everybody is a Ferrari fan. Even if they say they’re not, they are Ferrari fans. Even if you go to the Mercedes guys and they say ‘Mercedes is the best brand in the world,’ they are Ferrari fan.” Sebastian Vettel said this in 2016 during one of Mercedes’ most contentious internal championship battles.

During the Monaco Grand Prix in 2022, Lewis Hamilton (the face of Mercedes in F1 himself) proved Sebastian’s statement true. During an interview with an Italian newspaper, Lewis said, “I would say one thing: if I could sit down with the fans on the bleachers over there, I would support Charles. I am a Ferrari fan.”

And if you’ve been watching Formula 1 for the past few years, then you’ll think of how the once great Scuderia has become a clown show. Questionable strategies, awfully hilarious pit stops, and great drivers with their potential wasted. All of it is a common occurrence within the Scuderia that we have grown to expect as fans and are shocked when their plans actually work out.

Contextualizing Ferrari with the song Pompeii by Bastille and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius seemed like the most coherent way to understand this downward spiral from a once great and lauded team to its current form.

Pompeii is one of the most well-known sites of a major volcanic eruption and a disastrous end to a once great city. Perhaps it is the perfect allegory for Scuderia Ferrari as we know it today.

Eh, eheu, eheu

“Eh, eheu, eheu,” at first may just sound like a vocally beautiful start to a song about a tragedy forever remembered and memorialized in ash. But it is a Latin phrase, roughly translating to, “eh, alas, alas.” The phrase is an exclamation of pain, grief, and fear. It is an exclamation that many fans of the Scuderia can relate to. With every race weekend, there is fear of what may go wrong this time and grief at how badly it does go.

I was left to my own devices

Many days fell away with nothing to show

The city of Pompeii, before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a wealthy city. The residents, or at least some of them, lived luxurious lives with little responsibilities.

Ferrari, on a similar note, has rested on its storied history and has enjoyed luxuries that the other teams in Formula 1 do not get.

Ferrari has competed in every season of Formula 1 since the 1950 World Championships. Due to this, they have over 1000 race entries and status as a long-standing team.

One privilege given to Ferrari is the "historic bonus" from prize money. Despite not winning the constructors' championship, Ferrari tends to get more prize money at the end of the season than the winners. Since the 2021 regulation changes, Ferrari has received $35 million. Before 2021, the LST payment was $70 million, half of which was deducted from the prize money pool.

Another privilege enjoyed by Ferrari is the power to veto rule changes that won't benefit Ferrari or the sport as a whole. Thus, giving Ferrari more power than any other team in Formula 1.

Ferrari obtained the power to veto regulation back in 1980 as a means to keep them in Formula 1. During the renegotiations of the Concorde Agreement in 2019, Ferrari was able to retain the veto power. However, a key thing to note is that the veto power is used sparingly by Ferrari. It was last used in 2015 when Ferrari vetoed the FIA's plans to introduce a €12 million engine price cap. The proposal at the time had gotten a majority vote by the teams before the veto was utilized by the Scuderia.

So, Ferrari has gotten these unique luxuries and privileges for being an integral part to Formula 1 and the history it has within the sport. But despite all of this, there is "nothing to show for it" these past few years. Since the days of Michael Schumacher at the team came to an end, the Scuderia has been on a downward spiral.

You could argue that 2007 was a good year, they won both championships, didn't they? But, were it not for McLaren's Spygate scandal and then McLaren drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, more focused on beating one another, it's highly unlikely that the championships would have gone to Ferrari.

And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

Grey clouds roll over the hills bringing darkness from above

Before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, there were signs signaling that the volcano's period of dormancy was coming to an end. Most notably, in 62 AD, 17 years before the eruption, there was a major earthquake that devasted Pompeii and the surrounding region. The earthquake caused damage to buildings, with some of them collapsing, and a disruption to the water supply in the city. Now, we know that it was the first indication of Vesuvius awakening. Seventeen years later, when Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii was still rebuilding from the earthquake in 62 AD and the ongoing tremors that it had endured since then.

Regardless of how much time residents of Pompeii spent rebuilding after 62 AD, they never really were able to because ongoing tremors and quakes kept the walls tumbling down.

These days, as fans and spectators of the sport, we expect to see some sort of Ferrari blunder when it comes to pit stops or strategies. Monaco 2022's double-stack pit stop that cost Charles Leclerc a win at his home race comes into mind, or maybe Austin 2023 when Charles Leclerc was put on a one-stop strategy that took him from pole position to sixth place before disqualification due to the plank, or any number of impeding penalties that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz have gotten due to their team not relaying the information to them.

But just like the 62 AD earthquake in Pompeii and subsequent tremors, signs of Ferrari's downward spiral could be seen soon after the end of the Schumacher era.

We could think back to the Japanese Grand Prix in 2007 as Ferrari driver, Kimi Raikkonen, was in a championship fight with the McLaren drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. The wet weather conditions of the Grand Prix required that extreme wet weather tyres be used. However, both Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa were forced to pit so the tyres could be changed after the race had started under the safety car. While Kimi was able to finish 3rd, it did put him 17 points behind in the championship.

Another major blunder shortly after the Schumacher era that comes to mind, is the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix. A highly contentious race for many different reasons. You may recall Singapore 2008 for Nelson Piquet Jr. crashing, Fernando Alonso taking the win, and the entirety of the Crashgate saga with Renault. But as Crashgate was occurring, Ferrari was doing as Ferrari does.

In 2008, it was once more a McLaren driver and a Ferrari driver battling for the championship with Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa, respectively. When Nelson Piquet Jr. crashed and a safety car was brought out, many drivers chose to pit as there is less time lost during the pit stop. Felipe Massa, three seconds ahead of his championship rival, Lewis Hamilton, chose to pit. But unlike Lewis Hamilton and other drivers who had decent pit stops, Ferrari released Felipe too early with the fuel hose still attached to his car. A Ferrari mechanic was dragged along with the fuel hose and Felipe had to stop at the pit lane exit to release the hose. Thankfully, the mechanic was okay, but Felipe's race was compromised and the race ended with Lewis in the championship lead.

We were caught up and lost in all of our vices

In your pose as the dust settled around us

When Mount Vesuvius erupted, material from the volcano covered the residents of Pompeii who had not been able to escape the city. A common image that comes to mind when thinking of this is the stone bodies covered in lava that cooled and retained the shape. However, as the lava cooled around the dead, the bodies decomposed until there was a void left in those shapes. Since the 1860s, archaeologists and scientists have used the negative space in the rocks to recreate replicas of bodies with plaster.

The dead of Pompeii were left in this void and stasis. As are so many of the drivers who came to Ferrari with hopes of winning with the Scuderia, wanting to bring back glory to Maranello, and do as Michael Schumacher once did.

Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel.

They all joined Ferrari with hopes of winning the championship with the red team and all of them left with their dreams unfulfilled. An empty void of their potential was decaying from the inside as Ferrari continued to make endless blunders and not deliver cars that could win the championship.

But regardless of it all, nothing ever changes in the Scuderia. They're still caught up in the historic past as the dust settles and drivers with great potential leave.

Oh, where do we begin?

The rubble or our sins?

Oh, oh, where do we begin?

The rubble or our sins

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius was devasting for the city of Pompeii and the neighboring city of Herculaneum, but there were some survivors who were able to escape and relocate. Archaeologists have traced some survivors and figured out that they relocated to other cities with social and economic opportunities.

After disaster strikes, there is a question of what do we do first? Do we focus on the the physical things we can see like the rubble? Or the root causes of the disaster that we can't easily see?

Ferrari constantly treads this line of deciding what to focus on. Should they focus on the obvious with the pit stops, strategy, and car. Or the power struggles within the team and personnel.

The inner struggles within the team are endless.

Possible tensions between teammates Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz (which have been denied by both drivers, but instances during race weekends kind of make it seem like there is some tension - especially when it comes to qualifying orders)

The Sainz camp beefing with Charles Leclerc: Carlos' mother liking tweets about Charles not having honor, Carlos' father declaring "war" on Charles by saying that it's always Carlos that has to follow team orders and team orders are non-existent when Charles is behind.

The Lapo Elkann tweet about Santander, the Spanish bank that joined as a sponsor after Carlos Sainz joined the team

Departures of staff and Team Principal Fred Vassuer saying that Ferrari is "miles away" from a perfect structure

Ferrari has internal and external problems that they have to deal with before they can have a successful season. It's very obvious that the car isn't fast, the pit stops tend to be awful, and the strategy is rarely good, but there are also so many internal problems with fights for power in the Scuderia.

But if you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?

And if you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like you've been here before?

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

If you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?

In the four days leading to the eruption, the city of Pompeii experienced small earthquakes that continued to increase in frequency. However, as stated above, small earthquakes and tremors were commonplace in the Campania region where Pompeii was. So, for the thousands of residents, it wasn't a sign of death and destruction and life continued on as it normally did. Until Vesuvius erupted and there was nothing to be optimistic about, giving into the grief and pain.

At this point, after nearly twenty years of watching as Ferrari fumbles and destroys the hopes of its drivers and fans, it has come to be commonplace to expect the least from Ferrari. Pole positions are things of dread, double-stack pit stops are nightmare fuel, and openly fans think that drivers should leave the team if they want any chances of winning.

But yet, there is hope.

A look back to Monza 2023, when the Tifosi surrounded Charles Leclerc. The crowd sang "Leclerc bring us the Championship," having complete faith in the driver who went through the ranks from the Ferrari Driver Academy and made his way to Ferrari after just one year in Formula 1.

And it's not just the Tifosi that have faith and resilience in the face of what should be a demoralizing downward spiral from the heights of greatness with Michael Schumacher. Charles Leclerc continues to push and put the car where it shouldn't be with 4 pole positions this season. Making it the second most pole positions for a driver this season, only behind Max Verstappen's 11 pole positions. Always striving for more and not settling for being in the midfield.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Scuderia Ferrari are two Italian tragedies nearly 2,000 years apart. Echoes of one another despite only having an Italian background in common.

#formula 1 #f1 through music #ferrari #charles leclerc #sebastian vettel #carlos sainz #kimi raikkonen #felipe massa #the endless blunders of ferrari #pompeii #mount vesuvius #downward spiral at ferrari #inner power struggles at Ferrari #two italian tragedies millenniums apart #using history to explain formula 1

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jerrykinoff · 10 months

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Tommy Cash for Fucking Young! (September 2016)

#tommy cash

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 8 months

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reading update: January 2024

as long as I'm talking about The Gargoyle's Captive, let's discuss what else I've been reading this month.

Maeve Fly (CJ Leede, 2023) - I really liked this slender debut novel, which follows the titular Maeve Fly as she prowls LA like a homicidal alien, playing an unnamed ice princess in a certain theme park by day and indulging her murderous tendencies by night. Maeve is in a downward spiral; she's 27 years old and is preparing to lose her grandmother to illness and her only friend to a blossoming acting career. she sees no future for herself beyond losing the only two people she cares about and has no further goals, contenting herself with alcohol and porn while she rereads the same books, rewatches the same videos, and listens over and over to her playlist of Halloween music. Maeve is, it must be said, an abysmal loser, and I like her terrible melodrama a lot. I do think some of the hype is perhaps overstating the feminist credentials of this book; it sort of reminds me of when a college friend told me their favorite feminist movie was Suicide Squad (2016) because Harley Quinn was in it. Maeve talks a lot of big game about how women are always expected to have some tragedy to be deranged serial killers, while men are allowed to just do it, but it hit me as a little tryhard. there are a lot of books trying to be "the female American Psycho" right now - Eliza Clark's 2020 novel Boy Parts is frequently described as such - but it feels a bit too on the nose when Maeve's ultimate climactic rampage is directly inspired by a glimpse of the American Psycho novel. it's not that deep, but it is a gross, captivating read told from a fascinatingly cracked POV. check out Maeve Fly.

Laziness Does Not Exist (Devon Price, 2021) - yeah Devon Price is still following me (though my days are numbered, I'm sure) so it's a massive relief to say that I did like this book. Price has sort of become my self-help ride or die, mainly because a.) he's so much more self-aware than the average self-help writer that it feels kind of insulting to call him one and b.) he's actually dealing with topics that are relevant or interesting and providing actionable advice. while LDNE didn't engross me quite as hard as Unmasking Autism (while I am, famously, not autistic, I do believe in their beliefs, by which I mean I'm the token allistic among my close friends and I vastly prefer autistic company) it hit me hard in several unexpected pressure points. I'll happily admit that I can't relate to Price's interviewees who willingly work 50+ hours a week for jobs that hate them and are destroying their minds and bodies, but I still struggle to escape the perpetual sensation that a moment at rest is a moment wasted. It probably didn't help that I was reading this book while on vacation at my mother's, where I visited the beach almost daily and was so work-averse that we didn't even bother going grocery shopping because I didn't want to cook. and yet, despite getting dummy chill in some aspects of my life, I am still constantly possessed by a malevolent ghost insisting that I'm wasting my time and have never actually done Enough. maybe Price's next book, Unlearning Shame, will finally fix me; it's out in four days and god knows I'll be getting my hands on it as soon as humanly possible.

Patternmaster (Octavia E. Butler, 1976) - y'all know I love a messy political fantasy, and this is just... god, the absolute messiest. I thought Mind of My Mind was bad, but it turns out Mary's descendants are going to full-on reinvent feudalism with psychic powers, treating non-psychics as chattel and causing technological advancement to regress since they refuse to handle their problems with anything but psychic powers. and it's even got two brothers duking it out for the throne that will give them power over every bitchy psychic on earth! you love to see it. if I can be 100% honest I do think it's straight up bananagrams that this was the first book released in the series even though it's chronologically last; I genuinely cannot imagine caring enough to figure out what the fuck these people were talking about if I didn't have the previous four books for context. and even "context" may be generous; Octavia still has absolutely 0 interest in explaining what's up with the fucking outer space werewolves who are the psychics' #1 enemy. if I could have brunch with any person living or dead I would summon Butler up in a heartbeat to explain what the fuck her thought process was in plotting out this series over some mimosas, and I would take extensive notes on every word she said. an absolute genius and the uncontested queen of freak shit forever.

Thirsty Mermaids (Kat Leyh, 2021) - I purchased this graphic novel in November 2023 at a conference where I bumped into Queer Comics Peddler, my very favorite queer midwestern pop-up. running into them is always a delight, and this time I came with a question: could they give me a recommendation? the very nice people working offered up Thirsty Mermaids, which was the PERFECT companion for a long airplane ride. it's cute without being overly sappy, and avoids the trap of sacrificing a plot for the sake of checking off as many representation boxes as possible. the story is simple: three mermaids use a spell to turn into humans and go ashore in search of booze, only to realize in the morning that they don't know how to turn back. taken in by a generous bartender, they're faced with the reality of having to make money for the first time in their lives. hijinks ensue, but also a very sweet and warmhearted story about the friends looking out for one another as they try to figure out exactly where they belong and what home even means. also the artwork is GORGEOUS, with the mermaids' extremely memorable character designs being a real standout. if you're a graphic novel enthusiast, definitely check this out 🧜‍♀️

Sugar, Baby (Celine Saintclare, 2023) - Sugar, Baby came to me in a very similar way as Thirsty Mermaids: while visiting a witchy little bookstore that I was immediately charmed by, I asked the cashier what they would recommend. they offered up Maeve Fly (fab) and this novel, a stack of which was on the counter advertising an upcoming event with the author. neither have disappointed, so shout out to that one employee with the great taste! Sugar, Baby sees a young cleaner named Agnes, one of the only biracial women in her unnamed English town, befriending the daughter of a wealthy client and getting whisked away to her new friend's London lifestyle: crashing in an apartment with fellow models, staying out all night to party, and making money by going on dates with extravagantly wealthy older men. Agnes starts out having a swell time, but the cracks pretty swiftly start to form as she realizes how much more dependent she is on these men than her wealthy new friends and she begins to wonder exactly how much she's willing to diminish herself to get the bag. it's not a perfect first novel but it is a compelling one, a perfect airplane page-turner that crashes from glitzy to ghoulish and back with breakneck speed.

The Gargoyle's Captive (Katee Robert, 2023) - my full review is over on patreon for my darling supporters who want me dead (and picked this book in the first place, damn them to hell), but suffice to say this is a fun book to read if you like the sensation of your brain melting out of your nose, if you're really turned on by baby's first bdsm, you are not particularly concerned with trifling matters like "plot coherence" or "character motivation" or "writing that is complex and artful," and/or you've ever wanted to have sex with a dude whose penis is so big that you feel genuinely fear. also, hey, I forgot to include this in my patreon write-up so fuck it: Robert REFUSES to tell us what kind of food the protagonists are eating, ever. whenever they have a meal it's just "the food was placed on the table" "I took a bite" etc. drop me a HINT, man, come on! is it a protein? grain? starches? the only thing I know for sure that they're consuming is wine and a single marshmallow, and god does it show. it's just a very weird and distracting omission and it's absolutely not the worst thing about this book but it is a hill I'm willing to die complaining on.

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