#out of the country the lovable misfits you think they are

[grecoromanyaoi]

gd i hate american (and americanized) leftism so much jesus christ you lot are so stupid. ''omg the houthis are pirates just like one piece!1!!" theyre a heavily armed, religious extremist, powerful radical militia. actually. so not just like one piece. the world isnt a marvel movie where there are strictly good guys and bad guys and the "good guys" have no ulterior motives or underlying ideologies whatsoever. i think tv has rotted your brain

[raz-writes-the-thing]

hey raz! i heard you’re looking for tv show recommendations. you’ve come to the right place!

community is my favorite tv show in the whole world. depending on your country, you can find it on netflix, hulu, or prime i think. for me, it’s on hulu.

it’s a tv show about a group of lovable misfits in a community college. this show is a sitcom. it’s not what it seems! there are so many homage episodes, they make constant references, and this is the only sitcom not afraid to get emotional. it’s also incredibly funny!

each character has their own distinct personality, and this show is not like other sitcoms at all. most sitcoms need to have a cap on what can actually realistically happen, but at a community college that’s anything!

they even have a knockoff version of doctor who so that they can make references without getting sued. it’s called inspector spacetime!

trust me, there are so many more layers to this show. it’s one of my favorite things in the whole world. it’s my favorite thing to binge!!

Hey! Oh my gosh thank you so much!

So I tried watching Community last year w my now-ex and I wasn't a fan of the three or four episodes I watched but at the time my ex and I were kinda having the shits with each other and it was their idea to put Community on so I think that's maybe why I didn't like it?

Your ask has convinced me to give it another go though. So after I finish Succession I might try Community again.

Thank you so so much for this recommendation <3 I love it when you guys reach out with little pieces of your soul you think I might also like to try <3 <3

[alesreadings]

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.

5 stars.

“No mourners. No funerals. Among them, it passed for 'good luck.” If we added as soundtrack Gimme Gimme by ABBA to this book, it would fit. Can y'all imagine Inej, Jesper and Wylan stealing the tank and running away with that song on the background? Masterpiece. *chef kiss* Six of Crows is by far one of my favorite books. I read it two years ago, after the Grisha trilogy and I have to admit that Leigh Bardugo has improved tremendously as a writer. I consider this a much better story than her main trilogy. The plot, the characters, the writing, the pacing, the descriptions, the worldbuilding and the breadth she has given it is perfection. I'll go in order to describe how much I loved this book. In Six of Crows, we follow six misfits who have a common goal: thirty million kruge. They have to go to the Ice Court in Fjerda, the "safest" prison in the world and rescue, or kidnap, Bo Yul-Bayur, a Grisha who accidentally created a drug called jurda parem, which sharpens and increases the Grisha's powers, taking them to high and unknown levels. We have a sharpshooter who can't stay away from a good bet. A wayward son who was kicked out of his father's house and is underestimated, but is very smart. An ex-convict accused slaver, the world's most handsome, lovable, and idiotic fjerdan brute, out for revenge. A lost Grisha who makes a living healing people and trying to get the fjerdan out of the jail he put him in. A suli girl who is basically a ghost, the Wrath, a spy who defies the laws of gravity and is a sweetheart of a person. And finally, our favorite swindler: the Bastard of the Barrel, someone whom legends have turned him into a monster, someone without scruples, without morals or conscience. Will they be able to unite to achieve their goal and come out alive? Or will they end up killing each other before they reach Fjerda? Plot. As I said, compared to the Grisha trilogy, Six of Crows is perfection at its finest. It's not the first heist book (I've only read this one, sorry), but it grabs you from the first moment. I love that Leigh has taken up the Grisha again - I must confess that I love the Grisha order and how she has placed them - and that in this book she continues to include them as a fundamental part of the plot. Just like the first time, Six of Crows grabbed me, although I never understood why Joost and his chapter, I did feel bad that he was all dead. Each chapter had me hooked and begging for more. Even the very end left me screaming and crying like crazy. I have to repeat it: Miss Bardugo, this is a masterpiece, an exquisite and divine piece. Every plot twist had me in suspense or saying "I need more". It's a more radical departure from what we were given in the Grisha trilogy. They steal, explote things, destroy places and make great entrances, lol

Characters. Kaz "killer cane" Brekker. I want to protect him, and at the same time beat him with his cane. His story is touching at a certain point and makes you understand how or why Kaz became who he is now, why he is such a bastard, arrogant and fearless at the same time. There is never a challenge hard enough for him as he dares to prove otherwise. He shows us that he is one step ahead of the rest, and if he runs out of tricks, our demjin manages and invents more. Dirty Hands is a magician, a monster thirsty for revenge for the death of his brother, Jordie, thanks to a scam Pekka Rollins pulled on them when they were just kids. Kaz is full of secrets, tricks, schemes and more that it's scary to know what he's thinking. He's a bastard forged in the very cauldrons of hell, a seventeen-year-old kid who worked his way up through tooth and nail, using his brother's corpse to swim and get to where he is. Inej "The Wrath" Ghafa. Inej was captured and sold as a slave to the cursed Tante Heleen, who owns a brothel. Inej has the ability to go unnoticed, so much so that Kaz Brekker did not feel her approaching him. In any case, Kaz pays Inej's contract with Heleen and joins the Undesirables, becomes Kaz's right-hand man and his spy, or spider. Kaz and Inej are obviously in love, but they don't confess it to each other because it's complicated, and I don't know if I want to yell at them to kiss, or punch them to make them realize it. Inej deserves the whole world. She can stab me and I would appreciate it. Nina "my queen" Zenik. Nina had joined the Ravkan Second Army and was captured before the civil war in Ravka, she was imprisoned by the drüskelle to be taken to Fjerda to be tried for her crimes, which are basically: having powers. She is a heartrender, order of the Corporalki. She met my other goddess Zoya Nazyalenski. Well, anyway, Matthias was one of the drüskelle who imprisoned her and when their ship sinks, she saves him. Nina and Matthias wander around in each other's company and in the end, she brands him a slaver and Matthias ends up imprisoned in Kerch. One can feel the tension between them: enemies to lovers vibes, yup, I live for that. In the end, to save them all, Nina decides to consume jurda parem and knows that she will experience drastic changes in terms of her power and herself. Matthias "the tulip" Helvar. He is my beautiful baby, the most adorable bear and the cutest brute of all. You don't know how much I have laughed for him, he is so innocent in many things that I want to protect him from everything and everyone. Yes, I have a thing for blond brutes (Nikolai Lantsov, I'm talking to you too). From the first time I read Six of Crows, I instantly fell in love with Matthias and will be in love with him until I die. Amen. I already know what happens to him in Crooked Kingdom and I don't want it to come to that. Seriously he deserves all the love in the world, and even though I wanted to punch him many times, I also wanted to hug him and tell him that everything is going to be okay. In the end, Matthias renounces the beliefs that were instilled in him, accepts reality and becomes a Dreg, fighting against his own people. Jesper "crazy hands" Fahey. Jes is a Zemeni boy who came to Kerch to study at the university, but by chance, he ends up becoming a gambler. Jesper is a Grisha, a Materialki, and only Kaz and Inej know his secret. He is a fairly agile sharpshooter and a gambler who can't resist a good game without knowing he will lose. In a slip of the tongue, Jesper confesses what they are about to do and as they are about to leave Ketterdam, they are attacked. Jesper is a baby and I must protect him from all evil and danger. Plus, I really ship him with Wylan. Wylan "little merc" Van Eck. Another baby. I want to protect him from everything and everyone, especially his bastard of a father. Ugh, I hate him. When Jan Van Eck proves to be the jerk he is in front of his son, I wanted to cry with rage because my little baby boy doesn't deserve any of that. Wylan is smarter than others give him credit for, and

even Kaz thinks that just because he can't read doesn't stop him from doing amazing things; he doesn't put it that way, but I do. Worldbuilding. We find ourselves in a totally different country from Ravka. In the Grisha trilogy, we focused more on a description of Ravka, but now, we have two different places: Kerch and Fjerda. Although Shu Han, Novyi Zem, and Ravka are mentioned again, Ketterdam is a fairly fixed point. The description of the places is incredible: you seriously imagine it as a Dutch city in the Victorian era. Tell me I wasn't the only one. I don't know what else can I say about these assholes that I haven't already said. They're so chaotic, funny and you attach to them really quick, even if you want to kick them. I can't really believe they're 16-17-18 years old: they feel really older and "mature", but once you know them, you realize they're a bunch of kids trying to make a heist. Anyways, I loved Six of Crows with my entire life. I'm a sucker for this masterpiece and I'm really looking forward Crooked Kingdom, but knowing what happens to my tullip makes me wanna cry, scream and destroy the world. We stan Kanej, Helnik and Wesper, bitches. I love my Dregs. :')

[booksoanahasread]

Love & Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch

I found this book to be incredibly refreshing and exactly what my soul needed. I shall explain in the next paragraphs. 

I started this book this morning when I went to the library with my boyfriend, I knew that I would adore this book as soon as I had finished the first chapter. It was one of those books that just grabs you by the ears and doesn’t let you go until you finish reading it. 

Of course, the way the novel starts is with the death of the main character’s mother. That doesn’t really surprise me, since most young adult books start with some form of tragedy. 

Carolina, otherwise known as Lina, had to go through the loss of her mother very quickly, something that haunts her as she continues her life and grieving process. 

She is sent to Italy where she mets her father, Howard, who wants her to stay with him in the country and watch her grow for the rest of her life. She, on the other hand, is not sold on the idea, having just found out that he is her father. 

I really liked Lina, she was an incredibly complex, yet relatable character. She was lovable, even at her worst she did her best to make her mother proud. She was a courageous seventeen year-old who didn’t really care about anything but finding out what her mother had actually done before her birth. 

I could easily describe her as stubborn and impulsive, she demonstated this quite easily when she took Ren to Rome to find out the truth about certain aspects of her mother’s past. She was also very emotional, not that it wasn’t expected after what she had been through. To be honest, she was a character I could understand. 

The moment when she goes to Space, a club in Florence, with her friends and she is sexually assaulted by a man who is at least 15 years older than her I found hit close to home. She didn’t really know exactly what to do and what to say. She felt incredibly objectified and disgusted. How could she honestly react? She left the club with Ren and Thomas and she started crying, something I probably would’ve done. The fact that Ren had seemed so ready to go and “fight for her honour” was hilarious, yet at the same time a sure sign that he had truly fallen for her. 

I loved the fact that this book was a complete story about being a misfit and new in a place that you have no true ties to. Lina was an incredibly adaptable girl who had no time making new friends, and yet she didn’t lose touch with the ones she cared most about before she had gone. The way Lina didn’t understand the language in which everyone spoke or the culture that surrounded her felt rather familiar, something that everyone feels at least once in their life. 

She was a lost girl who didn’t really know what was happening around her, so she decided to find out the truth by her own means. Surely enough, she didn’t make the best decisions, seeing as she is an immature and impulsive teenager, but she never wanted to hurt anyone, a trait admirable on its own. She tried to save Horward from feeling bad about himself because of the situation at hand and multiple other reasons that she didn’t want revealed. 

She does end up falling in love, as I predicted, with Ren. Their relationship just seemed to flow naturally, nothing was forced by external sources. I found their friendship at the beginning to be so pure and cute that I wished I could be in her place for just one moment. They were both shy and didn’t exactly know how to react based on their emotions, as all teenagers do. It was funny to see them become more and more awkward as their friendship progressed. It was a mutually beneficial relationship where she loved him and he loved her, no conditions were applied. 

I think Lina takes her mother and Howard’s example as how two people should fall in love and how it should be in the end. Although the scene where Lina asks Howard how she could get over Ren and he says that she didn’t ask the right person because he fell in love once and has never truly gotten over it truly got to me. It was both funny, but it was also interesting that the dynamic of the relationship between Howard and Lina had changed completely. 

Ren was an incredible character who somehow knew what to say and when to say it. He always seemed like an outsider, and yet when he finally admitted that by explaining how he feels too American in Italy and too Italian in America it was as if he had shown who he truly was. He wasn’t the best at communicating with the girl he liked, but neither was she. He was just as adventurous and as stubborn as Lina. They both didn’t know how to express their emotions, but I think that Ren was a bit worse at that. 

The setting of this novel is absolutely incredible. The descriptions are phenomenal and they outline a cemetery with the same beauty as the rooftops of Florence. The whole Italian landscape was perfect for the book and it tied in very neatly with the story, not leaving out any loose ends or giving you the feeling that it shouldn’t have taken place there. 

To conclude, I think this is one of the most heartwarming books I’ve read recently and I’m so glad I finished it all in one day. I loved this book and I’m so glad I found it in the library. 

[I borrowed this book from Biblioteca Judeteana Cluj-Napoca, sectia de adolescenti]

[the-ronan-cycle]

Diverse Book Recs

I recently typed up a list of books for a friend who said she’d stopped reading because she couldn’t find diverse/queer books. This list is predominately focused on queer diversity but there’s also lot’s of super awesome ladies and poc here too. The list is also in two parts, the first are all books that I’ve read myself and include me trying to give a summary, content warnings (If I can remember, I can’t guarantee they’re all exhaustive.) and a rating. The second part has books on my to read list that, to my knowledge, have queer characters. All of the titles are linked to their goodreads page.

I Was Born For This - Alice Oseman

A Hijabi ace fangirl goes to London on a week long trip to meet her internet friend and go to the concert of her favourite band. Jimmy, the trans, gay, mixed race, mentally ill singer for said band is figuring out how growing up famous has changed himself and his friends. They cross paths and stuff happens. A really interesting look into fan culture, both the good and the bad. Really fun characters and relationships. Written by the same person who does the Heartbreaker webcomic. CW: alcoholic behavior, brief mention of unintentional trans outing 4.5/5

The Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater

Welsh mythology meets small town Virginia. Gorgeous, poetic writing by Stiefvater tells the surreal story of a group of teenagers on the search for a lost welsh king and wish foretold if one wakes him. Along the way they discover the power of ley lines, dreams, and ~friendship~. One of the main characters (my favourite character) is canon queer (he’s into a girl and guy but like, the word bi isn’t explicitly said) and one of the other main characters is canon gay. It’s a difficult story to describe but it’s such a fascinating read. CW: child abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, there’s a scene in the second book that I think the author confirmed was sexual assault 5/5

Shades of Magic Series - V.E. Schwab

Avatar the last airbender meets pirates and royalty and multiverses. In this world there are 4 earths that intersect at London. Kell is one of the only two people who can travel between Londons. Grey London is our world, Red London is Kell’s, full of magic. White London is a wasteland barren of magic and ruled by bloodthirsty twins. Black London is dead. The main cast of Kell, Lila Bard, a pirate thief who gets caught up in the adventure, Rhy, the (gay? Bi? I forget lol) prince of Red London, and Alucard, (also gay? Or bi?) actual pirate have to save the multiverse! Lots of great subplots, written by a queer woman and impossible to put down. If you saw me with my kindle in class after winter last year, it was because I literally couldn’t stop reading. CW: frankly it’s been too long since I read it im sorry 5/5

Leah on the Offbeat/Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli

Simon Vs is the book Love Simon is based on. Simon (gay) has a mystery pen pal, Blue. All he knows is that Blue also goes to Creekwood High and is gay. But Simon leaves the emails open on a school computer because he’s a dumbass and then also an ass but the bad kind, Martin finds them and blackmails Simon. It’s similar to the movie but I prefer the book! There are some scenes and plot points that didn’t make it in. Also his friends don’t suck as much when he’s outed. Leah on the OffBeat is the sequel about Simon’s friend, Leah. She’s bi! Simon thought all his friends were straight but jkjkjk gays flock together. Cute wlw high school story. CW: character is outed against their will, underage drinking  SVTHA 5/5 LOTO 4/5

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue - Mackenzi Lee

Main character is a total slut and we support him. Bi and ready to party. But wait it’s the 1800s and that’s not super chill. In a final hurrah before he has to become master of his family estate, Henry Montague takes his best friend (gay and also ready to party) and, reluctantly, his little sister  (ace and ready to be a doctor) on a tour of the continent. Along the way they discover a plot and their trip turns upside down. There’s pirates! Period accurate medicine! Characters unlearning their prejudices! CW: Child abuse, period typical homophobia, sexism and racism 4/5

Captive Prince Trilogy - C.S. Pacat

hEAR ME OUT. This is probably my favourite series I’ve ever read. You’ve heard of enemies to lovers? Get ready for enemies to friends to lovers to enemies to allies to lovers! Crown Prince Damianos of Akielos is caught up in a coup lead by his half brother and sent to the enemy nation of Vere to be a pleasure slave for their crown prince, Laurent. Now here you think it’s gonna be some kinky sex romp but it actually becomes the best political intrigue with a thoughtful, loving, very vanilla romance. “If you gave me your heart, I would treat it tenderly”. Dw they only have sex after the whole slave thing is over. Also, they abolish slavery so there’s that. If you don’t like the first book,  I get it but just try the second book, the tone changes with the change of setting. The author does some really interesting stuff with her setting. Typically writers will just make society reflect our by default but Pacat threw that out, homophobia? Never heard of her. In Vere it’s actually taboo for men and women to have sex before marriage because of the threat of bastards. So everyone just is gay instead. You want a matriarchal warrior women country? Pacat has got your back. The series does lack in well written women. There are a few women but not enough, Pacat has talked about this and is basically like, u right, I’ll do better in my next series. Written by a queer WOC (kinda? Woc is the wrong word but just read these tweets where she describe it better than i ever could)  and I love it, the end. CW: child abuse, child sexual abuse, incest, rape, sex slavery, prostitution, graphic violence, non consensual drug consumption, child death, suicide, torture, animal death (also it should be obvious but none of these things are glorified, the abuser is the worst and he sucks and everyone hates him) 6/5

Carry On - Rainbow Rowell

Based on the Harry Potter parody series from Rowell’s book Fangirl. Simon Snow (doesn’t ever figure out his sexuality but had a girlfriend and boyfriend) is the chosen one, orphaned and brought to a magical boarding school, must save magical britain from evil. His best friend, book smart Penelope and his (possibly evil and a vampire? Also gay) roommate Baz must work together to defeat the humbug. This book has a really fantastic closed magic system and gives the character very clear limits. CW: rat death? 5/5

Queer There and Everywhere - Sarah Prager

A nonfiction book about 23 people throughout history that were both queer and very cool. From Frida Kahlo and Abraham Lincoln to the actual Danish Girl and Kristina Vasa, Prager dives into the lives of many historical figures who were also queer. A really wide gamut of women, men and nb, cis and trans, white and poc. Could have had more historical figures from the east. A fun, easy read. Made me cry, i want lesbian moms. 4/5

Huntress - Malinda Lo

It’s been a few years since I read this so bear with me. Cool magic girl main character and less magic but also cool other girl as well as a misfit group including the prince and a badass lady named shae (hell yeah) have to go into the fae world to right the magical imbalance of their world. Wlw, written by a queer woc CW: I don’t remember sorry 4/5

Outrun the Wind - Elizabeth Tammi

(I’m actually only half way through this) (Also it’s written by a mutual of mine on tumblr so that’s tight) A queer retelling of the greek myth of Atalanta. Atalanta (bi) is taken by the hunters of Artemis and has to help them defeat Apollo who’s being shitty. Wlw, written by a bi lady CW: animal death

Iron Breakers trilogy - Zaya Feli

Bastard Prince (queer), Ren, is happy to be out of the line of succession and just party it up but suddenly is framed for the murder of his brother and on the run along with a prisoner who escaped with him. Ren is faced with realities of y’know, not being a prince and decides to help save his country. Political intrigue with some twists I didn’t guess. MLM CW: slavery, graphic violence 4.5/5

All for the Game trilogy - Nora Sakavic

Think dark, queer, sports anime but with a co-ed team. Neil Josten (demi sexual- “which way do you swing? “I don’t?”) is on the run from his mob boss, murderer father and finds himself on the collegiate exy team of the palmetto foxes. Exy, a violent cross between lacrosse and soccer is Neil’s favourite thing but the team is made up of misfits. Neil has to survive both his father and the Raven’s (another exy team) owner, another mob boss, coming for him and his team. Super fast paced, very intense, after the first book I couldn’t put it down. The characters are all super interesting as are the relationships. Multiple mlm relationships, one briefly mentioned wlw couple CW: (o boy here we go) suicide, graphic violence, graphic torture, non consensual drug consumption, alcohol and drug abuse, prescription drug abuse, non consensual kissing, rape, child sexual abuse, sex work, mention of gay conversion therapy, discussion of self harm and self harm scars, child abuse 4.5/5

The Posterchildren - Kitty Burroughs

It’s been years since I read this so I really don’t remember much. It’s about a school for superheroes. Definitely wlw I don’t remember any else 4/5

Six of Crows Duology - Leigh Bardugo

A misfit group of criminals is hired to travel north to break into an impregnable prison. The cast of characters is lovable and the plot is fast paced. It’s set in the same universe as Bardugo’s first series but you don’t need to read them. (I did and they were ok but six of crows is better). Two of the main characters are mlm. CW: gore, graphic violence, child abuse 4.5/5

The Percy Jackson Series and Magnus Chase Series

I don’t need to describe these lol. PJO has two canon gay characters, the most recent series has lesbian and ace huntresses of artemis, and a bi main character. Magnus Chase has a non binary main character starting in the second book.

On My To-Read List:

Orlando - Virginia Woolf

I love her writing, it’s poetic without hurting my brain to read. This is a classic queer novel. It’s been said that Woolf wrote it as a “love letter” to Vita, her lover. The main character changes gender throughout the novel.

Stars in Her Eyes - Clare C. Marshall

I bought a copy of the first book in this series from the author at a convention last summer. It’s about a school for people with powers. I asked and apparently there’s a queer character but you don’t find out til the second book.

Ash - Malinda Lo

A wlw retelling of cinderella by the same author as Huntress.

The Academy Journals - Garrett Robinson

Apparently there’s trans, lesbian, gay, poly, ace, bi, pan! It’s about a magical school. It has really good reviews on goodreads so that’s promising

The Abyss Surrounds Us - Emily Skrutskie

There’s gay lady space pirates. Actually maybe not space? Idk i got space vibes

Vicious/Vengeful - V.E. Schwab

A story about moral greyness and supervillains. Kinda reminds me of Nimona tbh. I heard the main character is ace?

Our Bloody Pearl - D.N. Brynn

There’s mermaids, and pirates, and it’s gay apparently. The main character uses they them pronouns I think.

Breaking Legacies - Zoe Reed

Fantasy wlw by a trans dude (i think? They went through some sort of gender transition but i can’t find their pronouns)

The Dark Wife - S.E. Diemer

A wlw retelling of Hades and Persephone

The High Court Series - Megan Derr

Fantasy political intrigue mlm and I was told the main character is trans

Btw my rating system was basically:

4/5=i enjoyed reading it and would recommend it but probably wouldn’t read it again

4.5/5=I really liked it and would probably reread it

5/5= i love it, i either have or plan to reread it

[mousieta]

Review: Itaewon Class, 2020

Watched in 2020 Year End Review

Country: Korea

Watched on: Netflix

Ugh, what to say about this. This is a controversial rating, I know, because it is a very beloved drama. And it does have its good points, which is what got me through to the end. I think there was a disconnect between what I wanted from this drama, and what it, ultimately, was. Which is fine. Not every drama has to cater to my taste but imma tell you why I didn’t care for it. 

What I wanted: a found family of socially ostracized misfits, struggling against a society’s expectations for them and ultimately succeeding as a team, against all odds. A story that addressed issues of class, race, gender and sexuality through the lens of lovable, endearing characters. 

What I got: all that shoehorned into a run-of the mill revenge story between the evil/ corrupt powers-that-be. Which - fine - the drama wanted to be a revenge-story but I feel so many dramas do that plot better. 

Pre time-jump, the drama was something refreshing and insightful.  I loved the exploration of race and sexuality and the way Korean society fails to accept those seen as ‘other’ who are still Korean. Characters like Toni as a Black-Korean and Hyun Yi as a transwoman were powerful and moving to see. And even Park Seo Joon’s character as a former convict provided an perspective on the struggles that group often face. 

It was even refreshing to see a platonic man/woman friendship in Sae Ro Yi and Yi So, one that acknowledges that there are boundaries of appropriateness between older men and young/ teen women. 

Then we jump and all of that got chunked out the window. The actors themselves didn’t even seem to fit into their ‘older’ roles - resembling nothing so much as kids playing dress up (which is bizarre as they were playing closer to their actual ages but is probably a result of trying to maintain character continuity with their younger selves).

Post time jump all that was interesting, refreshing and compelling about the characters and dynamic we were told to care about is replaced by your standard, run of the mill little guy vs evil chaebol machinations plot but not in a way that was interesting, or fresh, or revelatory.

Our found-family is lovable, our protagonist is good. 

He attains unbelievable successful because hard-work always pays off. 

He gets the girl (even though he rejected that same girl for good reasons but we can’t have our protagonist *not* be rewarded with the girl at the end). 

He gets his revenge.

But even within the revenge-plot the show manages to squander the last potential for an interesting character arc in Jang Geun Won’s character. The show opts to have him go full-comic-book villain which is tragic because Ahn Bo Hyun played him with so much depth that the potential for a redemption arc was ripe. But, as with everything else, the drama baits with a thoughtful premise then defaults to drama-standard cliche. 

To that end, there is appeal in the familiar, won’t rock the boat, the bad guys are bad and the good guys are good, all the well-trod plot points are hit on the nose while we get through our expected 16 episodes as anticipated and we can wash, rinse repeat on to the next one as this one fades into the obscurity of memory. So, if that is one’s cup of tea, this drama will deliver well enough. 

2020 Year End Reviews Masterpost

[metalandmagi]

Hogwarts House Anime Recommendations: Gryffindor

Okay, it’s that time again, time for the last round of Hogwarts house anime recommendations! And this time it’s Gryffindor!

other house recommendations:

ravenclaw

hufflepuff

slytherin

As we all know, Gryffindors are always in the spotlight and are basically the most represented house, and that sort of reflects in my recommendations. It was very difficult to try and think of lesser known shows to go with, so I mainly kept to what I thought are some of the most defining Gryffindor anime despite their popularity.

Some of the key Gryffindor traits running through these anime are bravery (bordering on recklessness), selflessness, and characters that are highly fueled by their emotions.

1. Haikyuu!!

For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, Haikyuu is an awesome sports anime. Lovingly referred to as “the volleyball anime” this story focuses on the once powerful Karasuno high school volleyball team, with Hinata Shoyo as one of the new first year members of the club who wants to work to take the team to nationals. However, also on the team is his middle school “rival” (a term I use loosely considering they only played one match against each other), and the two have to learn to work together to actually make the team successful.

I actually mentioned this anime in my Hufflepuff recommendations because I believe many sports anime do fall into that house. However, I actually think Haikyuu is a good Gryffindor anime because of its inclination towards showing the characters branch out and define what it means to be brave in their own separate ways. Each character has their own way of being bold and unique in their talents and work hard to make themselves better at the sport, even if it is scary for them. I mostly see this in Kagayama, Yamaguchi’s, and Asahi’s characters, but everyone has their own demons to fight. Hinata may be the main character but this is the only sports anime where I actually remember every member of the team’s names and care just as much about the other high school teams as well. This is going to go down as a classic sports anime because it keeps you gripped on the game as well as the growth of the characters without dragging out the play time or giving the characters super human abilities that is so rampant in the genre.

2. Hunter x Hunter (2011)

Again, for those who don’t know about it, Hunter x Hunter (at least the 2011 version) is basically a standard shounen anime setup about a spunky 12 year old kid named Gon, who starts a quest to find his “missing” father. Gon’s father is a Hunter, meaning in this world, he is part of an elite group of people who basically travel around the world just doing whatever the hell they want, from being hired as bounty hunters, to catching rare animals, or pretty much anything you can think of. So in order to find his father, Gon sets out to become a Hunter too, along with his lovable, rag-tag group of misfits. But be careful, this show starts out as a typical happy-go-lucky adventure anime and turns into an extremely dark and fucked up show involving everything from organized crime and genocide to the mass extinction of the human race to weird animal hybrids.

Okay stay with me, because this is gonna be a wild ride. I can only go off of the 2011 version, but this show is straight up amazing. I promised myself several years ago that I would get around to watching it someday, and that didn’t end up happening until the English dub started airing on Toonami in 2016. After watching the first 5 episodes dubbed on television I sprinted to my computer to watch the rest of the series as fast as possible...while also catching the dubbed episodes every week. Around episode 115 or so, I realized I was going to burn through this anime...and I didn’t want it to end. So now I’m back to watching one dubbed episode a week as it comes out just so I could prolong the experience. That’s how good this anime is. So technically I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s only because I don’t want to end it….and also I had some serious issues with the pacing of the last arc.

In terms of why it fits Gryffindor so well, all you have to do is watch Gon for about 5 minutes. All of the main characters...apart from Killua...have very noble goals and want to help others in their own ways. Hisoka is also one of the best...villains?…..anti heroes?...antagonists?…. that I’ve ever seen, and he is a great mixture of discomfort and intrigue to watch every time he’s on screen. If you love the old school shounen shows, if you want to feel nostalgic for when you were a kid watching Naruto or Bleach, if you want a show with clearly defined arcs, interesting characters, and not one, but two of the best tournament arcs I’ve ever seen, then for the love of all that is good, GO WATCH THIS SHOW if you haven’t already...I know I’m pretty late to the game with this one.

3. Akatsuki no Yona (aka Yona of the Dawn)...And Arslan Senki (aka The Heroic Legend of Arslan)

It’s official, I can’t do one of these things without doing a double recommendation. But seeing as these anime fit so well together and the protagonists seem very similar, I figured I had to do both. Both of these shows focus on the sweet cinnamon rolls royalty of a kingdom trying to regain their thrones after their respective countries have been overthrown or taken down from the inside. Akatsuki no Yona deals with a young princess who is trying to bring together a group of magical dragon people in order to regain the throne and fix the problems with her country. Arslan Senki (the 2015 anime version, not the ova), is more military oriented, focusing on a young prince trying to free his country as well as his father and mother from an invading country, led by a villain wearing a silver mask...who may have more of a claim to the throne than Arslan does.

Both of these shows are very fantasy oriented and desperately need to be continued. They also both have tried and true Gryffindors as the main protagonists who only want what’s best for their people. Arslan and Yona both look at the world through very innocent eyes but have to learn the harsh realities of their kingdoms and be brave enough to overcome all obstacles with the help of their friends.

4. Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle

This anime follows four main characters (Kurogane, Fai, Syaoran, and Sakura) as they travel through different worlds trying to find pieces of the shattered soul of Princess Sakura. This takes place in the same universe as literally every other CLAMP created work, meaning that yes, it is the same Sakura as the one in Cardcaptor Sakura….just in a different world. If you’re a fan of anything CLAMP related, you need to watch it if you haven’t already.

This show will probably mean a lot more to people who have seen/read literally every CLAMP anime/manga in existence, but I actually hadn’t seen any other CLAMP material before watching this show. I basically just knew that Cardcaptor Sakura was a thing that existed and Tsubasa involved those main characters. But this anime is what sparked my love for the universe, so you don’t really have to know anything about the CLAMP universe to enjoy the anime (the manga on the other hand is a completely different story). I have always thought that Sakura, Syaoran, and Kurogane are all good examples of Gryffindors in different ways. Kurogane is more of a protective father figure, first showing nothing but recklessness and learning to become more thought out in his plans. Sakura is a Gryffindor in the sense that she also wants to protect people and learns to be brave over time, while Syaoran’s sole purpose is protecting Sakura and can be extremely chivalrous. Anyway it’s a fun adventure show that leads into a very dark and mysterious set of OVAs that will make you go “damn I should read the manga....and also every other CLAMP manga I can get my hands on.”

5. Attack on Titan

Yes, I had to. There was no way I could leave out Attack on Titan from a Gryffindor recommendation. I’m not even going to bother with a summary, since everyone and their dog has at least heard of it. This truly is the most Gryffindor anime to ever Gryffindor. It completely embodies the idea of the house both in the actual anime and in the real world. It even has it’s own golden trio, with a bookish character, a “chosen one” character, and a character who relies mostly on instinct.

Like I said, Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are all great Gryffindors in the same way that the original golden trio are. The plot of the show constantly evokes the idea of doing what’s right, even if it means putting your life on the line. Everyone who joins the military in this universe knows they need a mixture of bravery, daring, and just the right amount of recklessness to be successful. Even in the real world the anime has been in the spotlight the same way Gryffindor house is all the time, with great characters, an interesting plot, and intriguing world building that keeps people invested even with four year waits for the next season. Every episode has you rooting for the main characters in the same way that you root for Harry Potter and the rest of the gang. Not to mention it looks and sounds fucking amazing. So if you decided to skip the second season because you’ve read the manga...don’t. The anime just makes everything a million times better.

So that’s the end of my Hogwarts house anime recommendations! Sorry I couldn’t really branch out very much with Gryffindor house, but I tried my best. I hope these are helpful!

[tgwltw]

My dad is emotionally abusive and just in general sucks and I'm really upset today because with it being fathers day, my family has it that I "Have" to hang with and do as my father says......I was wondering if you could cheer me up by writing something like bruce and alfred being good adoptive father figures to a male reader who just sorta ended up hanging with the batboys, with it slipping that the readers family life isnt great, despite the readers happy outward face.

Hi, I’m really sorry to hear that. Ihope this cheered you up enough? If you ever need someone to talk to, reach out yeah? I originally had something else planned for Bruce, Alfred and Clark but I figured since this is a request that youseem to need, I tried my best with it! Hope this is able to cheer you up a bit!

“Young master Y/N, will you bejoining us for dinner today?” Alfred asks when you walk by the kitchen,trailing after Tim who is still chattering about what he had gotten for Bruce.You blink a couple of times, pausing to think about the offer. On one hand, youreally want to stay and have dinner with the family but on the other hand, youknew if you went back home, you are just going to be super fucking miserableand your family might even get mad at you for skipping tonight.

Tim must have seen the briefconflict on your face. “Yeah, he’s staying for dinner, Alfred.” Tim answers foryou and you shot your friend a look. Tim simply shrugs. “Come on, we still needto play the game. Alfred’s going to call us for dinner once it’s about done.”Tim pulls you in the direction of his room.

“Thank you, Alfred!” You call outover your shoulders.

Alfred simply smiles at you.

The moment you reach Tim’s room, youimmediately went for the bean-bag you have claimed as yours, making yourselfcomfortable. You watch Tim plug in his PlayStation and hands a remotecontroller over to you. “Tekken 7?” He asks and you shrug your shoulders.

“I’m game.”

The two of you had spent the entiretime playing Tekken 7, shouting and screaming at each other as you tried tobeat Tim. You are somewhat thankful you had gotten the chance to meet Tim thatone day. It went from casual conversations about the latest games and latestupdates to having actual conversations about all sorts of games the both of youplayed and soon, Tim and you became quick friends.

The competition between you and Timare put to a stop when Alfred knocks on the door. “Young masters, it is almosttime for dinner. If you could head over to the dining hall, it would befantastic.” Alfred announces and Tim nods his head.

“Why don’t you head down first? Ineed to take a quick shower.” Tim tells you and you nod your head. “I thinkDamian should be downstairs somewhere.” Tim turns to look Alfred.

“Master Damian is currently in thestudy, playing with Titus as we are speaking.” Alfred nods his head to confirmTim’s suspicions. You got off the bean-bag and hand the controller you had beenusing to Tim. “Follow after me, Young Master Y/N.”

You left Tim’s room and quicklyfollowed after Alfred. You really look up to Alfred. The first time you had metAlfred, you had been a little bit afraid because of his stern expression butyou quickly find out that despite his expressions, he was lovable and his quickwits amazed you.

“Alfred, will everyone be around fordinner today?” You finally ask. “It’s just that today’s Father’s Day and all.”You casually point out and Alfred shakes his head.

“Not everyone, unfortunately. MasterDick is currently out of the country for a job and if all is well, Master Jasonwill drop by when he is finished with his.” Alfred tells you as he leads youdown to the dining hall. He didn’t really have to do that to be quite honestseeing as you have already been hanging out with them a lot to know where thedining hall is but it still made you somewhat happy.

“I see.” You say softly. “Areeveryone happy?” You randomly ask when he leads you to where you will besitting.

Alfred looks at you before givingyou a knowing smile. “Do you know why we fall sometimes, Young Master Y/N?” Heasks you instead and you frown as you tried to think of an answer. “So that wewill learn how to pick ourselves up.” You take a seat on the chair and furrowyour eyebrows.

“Being happy is a choice, son. Itsimply means that they have simply decided to see beyond the imperfections.”Alfred tells you as he recalls every little thing the entire family had gonethrough and he places a hand on your shoulder. “You just have to choose it andfight to be happy.” He lifts his hand from your shoulder, dropping it to hisside. “Dinner will be served shortly.” Alfred then excuses himself leaving youwith a few questions rather than answers.

You never looked forward to Father’sDay. What with the situation back at home and your father was just plain rotten?Constantly abusing you emotionally, to the point where you are just so tiredand done and you tend to find excuses to not stay at home. It makes you wonderbriefly if Tim – and the rest of his family – knows about your situation backat home. You had been careful too, not letting it slip just how unhappy yourfamily – more specifically your father – made you feel.

“Tt. It is you.” Damian walks inwith Alfred the Cat chilling on his shoulders and you give Damian a wave. Henods his head curtly as he takes his seat. “You are looking worse for wear.Whatever have you been doing?” Sometimes you forget Damian’s a thirty-year-old stuckin a ten-year old’s body and you chuckle. “Tt. I see nothing funny about myquestion, Y/N.”

You shake your head. “I justremembered something but do I look that bad? I think I’m getting more sleepthan Tim does.” You point out, looking at your reflection on the spoon. Yeah,you might have eye-bags beneath your eyes but that was certainly nothing new.At times, you can’t sleep, your thoughts plagued by the thoughts of your dad.

Damian shrugs his shoulder, pickingAlfred off of his shoulder to place him on the floor. “Run along and find Titusnow, Alfred.” He tells his cat and you smile. You never thought he would havean affinity with animals – it was kinda adorable.

Not long after that, Tim appears,chatting with Bruce.

“Hello, Y/N. How are you?” Bruceasks you when they reached the table. Tim takes a seat beside you, leaving theseat beside Damian empty and Bruce sits down on his chair.

“Still alive and breathing, sir.”You grin at Bruce and he nods his head, a small smile on his face. Anyconversations that were about to happen after that is cut short because Alfredcame in bringing dinner. Eating home-made food was always something you lookedforward to and sometimes you think Alfred spoils everyone in this house withhow good most of his food were. You thank him and Alfred tells you to eat yourfood well before taking a sat at the far end of the table – still mindful ofthe fact that he is a butler – even though you are sure no one in the housereally thinks of him as a butler anymore.

The rest of the night is spent withyou watching everyone interact. Halfway through dinner, Jason comes walking inand it was amusing for you to see Damian interacting with Jason. Despite hiscold attitude towards him, you can see that Damian actually looks up to Jasontoo. Perhaps this was what Alfred had meant by his answer to your question.

You have come to notice thateveryone is a misfit here and everyone just clicks. It makes you a little bitsad that your own family is not like this. But you tried to put that at theback of your mind, especially since both Tim and Damian had invited you to stayover and you jumped at the chance. Anything to spend the night away from yourfamily.

You thought you had a grip on yourown emotions and managed to go about the rest of the night without giving awayyour problems. But you thought wrong. Just as you are about to go in one of theliving rooms – where Tim and Damian had set up their mattresses – Bruce stopsyou. “Our house is open for you whenever you feel like it, Y/N.” You frown atfirst, confused by what he is saying.

Bruce gives you a small smile. “Afather figure of mine once said, however dark and scary the world might beright now, there will be light.” He stares at you and you reel back from theshock when you finally understand what he was trying to say without actuallysaying it.

“Thank you, sir.” You tell him. “Thankyou.”

Bruce shakes his head. “Remember,the house is open for you whenever.” He tells you once more before leaving youto digest just what had happened.

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews... Flaked (S02E02) Day 2 Airdate: June 2, 2017 @flakedmusic Ratings: @netflix original Score: 8.25/10 Waking up on the beach is one thing... I'd love to say 'we've all been there' and mean it, but I realize that not everyone is both naturally self-destructive and lives close to large bodies of water... Anyway, It's another thing to wake up on the beach in a town that you once reigned King in. Adding insult to injury the French woman runs by and throws a few Euros in Chip's empty coffee cup he totes around with him everywhere he goes for the entire duration of the episode. It's unexplainable why I like these little moments so much. 'Flaked' is the definition of nuance... And it's funny to me, seeing so many scrambling to create easy definitions or logic for certain characters' behaviors. I think that sometimes life is thrown at us and we just just instinctively react... Sometimes it's our inner selves going into a sort of protection mode without even realizing it, and other times it's as simple as picking the wrong path at a fork in a road. Some of us, like Chip (Will Arnett), like Dennis, like London, or any of 'Flaked's disturbingly porcelain characters are destined for self-destruction. There's no way around it. It's second nature, like breathing, or holding your breath underwater... You just do it, and when it comes to addicts there is often little to no real reason why. Chip just blows back into Venice Beach and it takes Dennis (David Sullivan) less than 24 hours to let him back in to his life. Offering up a role reversal in power with letting Dennis this that Chip truly wanted him to be his sponsor was all it took. This speaks volumes on not just the dynamics of Dennis & Chip's relationship, but also how truly lonely and desperate for validation that Dennis can be. We've gotten a good visual and tight grasp as to why Dennis is the way he is... His mother, played by Kirstie Allie last season was an absolute spectacle (one I hope we get a chance to revisit this year), and Dennis couldn't stand that. The drama, the attention seeking, it drove him crazy... And it's easy to connect those dots to Dennis needing such a great deal of validation in his life from his peers and the people that he knows. The beginning sequence as Dennis is sharing at the AA meeting is so familiar to me. Now that Chip is out of the picture, or was out of the picture, Dennis has attempted to fill that role that Chip left behind in his absence. Obviously, he's not necessarily filling that void, but the mere thought that he 'could be' is enough for him. In this group of misfits, Dennis and Chip are not the only miscreants or oddballs... Everyone is basically in that 'group', per se. They all do bizarre things because circumstances in life compels them to do so. London (Ruth Kearney) is a great example of this. She's pushed Chip away as he's slowly lost his 'glow' or special interest that he held in her eyes throughout S1. She's not only left him without a place to stay, and knowing *for sure* that he actually has somewhere to rest his head at night (those with significant others, think about that one for a moment... Id have a fucking iPhone tracker with updates sent to my phone every few minutes! 🤣), but she's also searching for someone or something to spark some kind of rejuvenation or just anything to make her feel complete again. She's seeing this phony, stereotypical, West LA, wannabe shaman type, Karel (played to the MAX by Animal Kingdom's Shawn Hatosy). Just like in Animal Kingdom, he gives me the creeps... For different reasons obviously, but this is a man who is the definition of transparent... He doesn't even get translucent. Everyone in his class stares at him so intently. He is the sun and they aren't even planets... They're not even moons of planets... They are like fading stars, lost souls, looking for anything to believe in, and he gives them that in the most superficial way possible and there they sit just eating every bit of it up. It's so outrageous that I can hold so much disdain for so many characters in one show, yet still be completely mesmerized by them all, unable to look away. 'Flaked' is the trainwreck that keeps on giving, keeps on piling on the bullshit, daring the audience to look away... But we can't. At least Cooler (George Basil) is somewhat likable. He remains that lovable idiot that's shown absolutely no growth whatsoever. Normally I'd clock a show for that, but that's Cooler, that's him! Cooler is the type of guy who opposes legalization because it puts dealers out of jobs. Cooler is both hilarious and tragic, stuck in a never ending cycle of repetition and failure. Everyone knows a Cooler... It doesn't matter where your from... Cooler is the guy you've known forever who is perpetually positive and may or may not be stuck in a dead end job. They have no plan whatsoever, besides some pipe dream that's completely unobtainable... And if they do have a job, they most likely settle for mediocrity. It doesn't phase them. Cooler's are easy to love, but fuck are they frustrating! Before we move on, I just have to get a good Air BnB punch landed somewhere. I live in Miami Beach, as most of you know, and everyone who lives on this island in Miami-Dade County is most likely either in a position where they Air BnB parts of their home or they live in a hotel/condo/hole in the wall above a bar or club that rents out rooms via Air BnB. We get Europeans, South Americans, Americans, a multitude of people... Just like they would in Venice Beach. I see a lot of people from Germany quick to dismiss this type of portrayal of travelers from their country and while everyone can rest assured that we Americans know that not everyone is like the triage portrayed in Flaked 2x02, I can also assure everyone that these types do come through... And they aren't always German, but I had to laugh because this is very atypical for a town that depends on tourism for their economy. Not only are there people like this for real, there is *NO LIE* a couple from Germany right down the hall from us right now who even looks like these guys. What's funny is that in another streaming show (on Amazon instead of Netflix), Red Oaks, a French couple is portrayed in a similar light. Again, we aren't daft to think that everyone from a single country is like this, but there is a reason you see these stereotypes show up in a show based in irony and realism like 'Flaked'. It's funny because it fucking true... Think of 'Flaked' as representing the piece of ourselves and our culture that we're most embarrassed of. Because just like not everyone in the states is like the cast of 'Flaked', I watch because not only do I see people I know in the faces of this cast... I feel like I know this cast. 'Flaked' has become such a special gem to me. I work hard to position this series in a cornerstone perspective because I feel it's so under appreciated... By critics, by the media, by average viewers. There's something so real, so honest, and so ultimately humiliating about Flaked. It's like... walking around your hometown completely naked while you continue to hit different levels of rock bottom... Each level represents another low you thought could never be possible, but here we fucking are... Right? Can I just bask in 'Flaked's awkwardness and humility for a moment. I mean... Seriously... Dennis' New love interest that he's gabbed on and on about at meetings and to anyone who would listen is Rosa (Lenora Crichlow) who is actually George's (Robert Wisdom) daughter and Chip is walking right into yet the another disaster, lying to London and sleeping over at his new 'female sponsor's house. Can it get anymore beach side, sun soaked, shameless than this? Let me answer that... Yes!!! This is just 'Day 2' of 6! So goes 'Flaked'!!!

[daniellethamasa]

Hey all, Dani here.

Welcome to the first Calendar Girls post of 2019. What exactly is Calendar Girls? Well, I’m glad you asked. Let’s talk about all those details before I start talking about this month’s theme and all the possible book options.

Calendar Girls is a monthly blog event that was started by Flavia and Melanie, but is now being hosted by Katie and Adrienne. They are all wonderful ladies, and you should check out their lovely blogs. Oh, and if you go to either Katie or Adrienne‘s Calendar Girls post each month, they will have links to all the other wonderful book bloggers participating in this event.

First, more about the Calendar Girls. It is designed to ignite bookish discussions among readers, and was inspired by the 1961 Neil Sedaka song, Calendar Girl.

Just like the song, each month has a different theme. Each blogger picks their favorite book from the theme, and on the first Monday of the month reveals their pick in a Calendar Girls post. Make sure to post back to the hostess’s post, and both Katie and Adrienne will make a master list for the month. The master lists allow everyone to see the other Calendar Girls’ picks and to pop on over to their blogs. Thus, we all get to chat about books and even make some new friends!

Oh, and you don’t have to identify as female to join the Calendar Girls. We welcome readers of all types. So if this sounds like fun for you, join us in all of the fun bookish conversations. All right, let’s go ahead and get to talking about the January theme, and then the runners up and the winner. Forewarning, this is a pretty long post and I talk about quite a few books. Sorry, not sorry. I love books.

The theme for January is…

Happy New Year

2019 Release You’re Most Looking Forward To

Oh man, there are so many 2019 releases that I’m looking forward to…and I know I’m probably missing some great ones too. So, I really look forward to reading all the other posts for this month, just in case there are books that I really should have on my release calendar.

But, for the purposes of selecting a pick for this month, I managed to narrow my options down to 12 books. So I’m going to start with talking about my contenders, and then I’ll have to choose my winner from all of them.

Obviously, most of what I’m excited for is fantasy releases. What can I say? They’re my favorite.

First up is the newest release from Brigid Kemmerer, A Curse So Dark and Lonely, which is coming out January 29th. This is apparently an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, so I’m definitely excited about it.

Then there is Imprison the Sky by A.C. Gaughen, expected January 22nd. The first book, Reign the Earth, was outstanding, and I’m really curious to see what will happen next, because the magic and the politics were very intriguing.

Obviously, King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo has to make this list. This first installment of a Nikolai centered duology will be released January 29th as well, and I’m hoping for wonderful and diverse characters, plenty of drama and complications, and a romance I can root for.

Next, I have to mention Bloodwitch by Susan Dennard, which will be released on February 12th. Now I just talked about this book a little bit a couple days ago, so I don’t want to say too much this time, but I love all the different witcheries in this series, and I’m happy that this book will have a focus on Aeduan, because he is a fascinating character.

Crown of Feathers by Nicki Pau Preto is a relatively new add to my release calendar, but we’ve been getting a lot more Asian inspired fantasy books these past couple years, and I have been super pleased with pretty much every one I’ve read, so I can’t wait to see what other wondrous reads we get. This book will also be released on February 12th.

Rin Chupeco’s conclusion to The Bone Witch trilogy–The Shadow Glass–is definitely one of my highest anticipated books. I was lucky enough to be granted an e-galley of the first book and an ARC of the second book, but no such luck with this one, so I have been waiting for what feels like forever. I can’t wait to pick this one up March 1st.

I won’t spend much time at all talking about Emily A Duncan’s April 2nd release, Wicked Saints. If you want to know all my gushy feels, go check out my early review for it. But this is a book that makes my D&D cleric loving heart so dang happy. This is definitely a contender for one of my favorite books right now.

When I read Ashley Poston’s Geekerella, I loved all the fandom and charm. So to find that it is getting a sequel/companion just made me super happy. I’m ready to go to another fandom and have more cute geeky interactions. I wish I didn’t have to wait until April 2nd to get my hands on The Princess and the Fangirl.

Kingsbane by Claire Legrand obviously has to make this list, considering how much I loved reading Furyborn last year. I want to know more about these women, this world, and the magic and politics going on. This book will be released May 21st.

I love some good epic fantasy, and I was expecting quite a bit when I read Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep last year. It didn’t disappoint, but I’m still hoping for more with the sequel, Protect the Prince, expected May 15th. I want more badass gladiator women, and obviously more tantalizing descriptions of food.

Give me more fun and tricks, plus more action, drama and romance, with Soul of the Sword by Julie Kagawa, to be released June 25th. I absolutely adored Shadow of the Fox when I devoured it last year, and I need more of this fantasy adventure with Asian mythology and folklore influences. So good.

Finally, I have The Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee, set to be released on July 16th. This is a book set in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and follows a previous Avatar, namely Earthbender Kyoshi. My fiance introduced me to both Avatar and Korra since we started dating, and I have watched both shows, as well as reading all of the comics. I am so ready to see what we’ll learn with this book series.

Okay, so there are a lot of fantastic options here. And I’ve already realized that I’ve missed a few books. More than a few if I’m being completely honest, but I read a lot of books, so my release calendar is pretty full already. But the more I look at all of these, the more I’m thinking that my choice actually isn’t any of the ones I’ve mentioned already. If this had been the theme a couple months ago, my answer would have been Wicked Saints, but I feel bad picking that now because I already have read it and I know that I absolutely love it. So I can’t really call it an anticipated book any more; all I’m anticipating is having a final edition in my hands.

So I’m going to pick another book, and that’s great. I love getting to talk about even more books than I originally planned. All right, so here is my final choice for this month’s Calendar Girls theme.

I think I need to re-read the first book before I write up the review for it, but the Tales of Pell series is utterly hilarious. It is filled with so many classic fantasy tropes that get turned on their heads, as well as pun after glorious pun. This isn’t a dark or serious fantasy, like some we’ve come to expect, but it is still entirely worth a read.

Based on the summary, I’m thinking No Country for Old Gnomes will be just as entertaining.

Go big or go gnome. The New York Times bestselling authors of Kill the Farm Boy return to the world of Pell, the irreverent fantasy universe that recalls Monty Python and Terry Pratchett.

War is coming, and it’s gonna be Pell.

On one side stand the gnomes: smol, cheerful, possessing tidy cardigans and no taste for cruelty.

On the other side sit the halflings, proudly astride their war alpacas, carrying bags of grenades and hungry for a fight. And pretty much anything else.

It takes only one halfling bomb and Offi Numminen’s world is turned upside down—or downside up, really, since he lives in a hole in the ground. His goth cardigans and aggressive melancholy set him apart from the other gnomes, as does his decision to fight back against their halfling oppressors. Suddenly Offi is the leader of a band of lovable misfits and outcasts—from a gryphon who would literally kill for omelets to a young dwarf herbalist who is better with bees than with his cudgel to an assertive and cheerful teen witch with a beard as long as her book of curses—all on a journey to the Toot Towers to confront the dastardly villain intent on tearing Pell asunder. These adventurers never fit in anywhere else, but as they become friends, fight mermaids, and get really angry at this one raccoon, they learn that there’s nothing more heroic than being yourself.

In No Country for Old Gnomes, Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne lovingly tweak the tropes of fantasy and fairy tales. Here you’ll find goofy jokes and whimsical puns, but you’ll also find a diverse, feminist, and lighthearted approach to fantasy that will bring a smile to your face and many fine cheeses to your plate.

Come on. Does that not sound like an absolutely hilarious and awesome book? I’m thinking I may actually try to pick this series up in audiobook. I have the hardcover of the first book, but I think this might be a good series to listen to.

I laughed so much while reading Kill the Farm Boy. I’ve read quite a bit of Kevin Hearne, but not much Delilah S Dawson, which is going to change sometime soon-ish. But they have co-authored an amazing series, set in an awesomely put together world, with a random and hilarious cast of characters.

Wow…this post went so much longer than I expected it to. Oh well, there were lots of great books to talk about. That’s all from me today, but I’ll be back soon with more bookish content.

Calendar Girls: January 2019 Hey all, Dani here. Welcome to the first Calendar Girls post of 2019. What exactly is Calendar Girls?

[jacksgreysays]

shikaara, "call on your angels"

Anon, this was one of the more difficult yet compelling prompts I have received during this event. It’s such a seemingly simple phrase and yet evokes such specific imagery that I could not figure out what to do for a good three days. Like a nice mental puzzle I could ponder on while things got slow at work.

Angels, anon. Angels! Unless you meant the Charlie’s Angels franchise, then there’s only really one other reference that could be. And it’s not all that compatible with the culture of the Naruto world, so I know the fake fic has to be either an AU of some sort and/or a metaphorical “angels.”

And the Shikaara aspect! I will be the first to admit I am a Shikaara shipper, anon, but it’s a surprisingly tangling part of this prompt. In order to stay… not in character, but accurately relative to each other… Shikako and Gaara have to be from different places. Whether that be countries as in canon or in various AUs–schools, teams, departments, etc–and in my head I’m just like:

Are they enemies that can summon and battle each other with angels? Is one of them the guardian angel of the other and gets frequently summoned to do battle on their behalf? Why am I thinking about battling angels? I mean, actual legit angels are frightening flaming wheels of millions of eyes so that might be cool and horrifying to watch do battle. Wait. What?

Then I thought, hm, what about that reverse/remix of Stories of Ancient Gods–aka, instead of Final Fantasy VII being the distant past of DoS, DoS is the distant past of FFVII. Shikako’s Gelel stone means she can be summoned in the future to help stop Sephiroth/Jenova, whereas the bijuu are the WEAPONs and the jinchuuriki their humanoid avatars. But then that kind of got away from me and it just didn’t sit right.

And then I considered something like the Inuyasha-esque fusion–fully aware of the irony–but with Gelel instead? Like canon!Suna people are in the Gelel Empire and Shikako travels back in time to that era while researching the Dead Wastes and it’s Shikako displaced in time. Which led me to a slightly tweaked version that became Atlantis: The Lost Empire featuring Milo!Shikako and Kida!Gaara–and the rest of Konoha Twelve as the crew of misfits.

So… yeah. An AtlantisxDoS fusion… Never mind that I’m pretty sure Uzushio is the Naruto world equivalent of Atlantis… anyway.

Call On Your Angels

Shikako and her crew of destructive but lovable misfits brave the Dead Wastes in search of the Lost Empire of Gelel.

Action! Adventure! Romance! Betrayal?

I think, instead of Shikako being conscripted onto the crew and being caught off guard when their mercenary ways are revealed, there’s a bit of Ocean’s Eleven mixed into it? Or Inception.

Like, Haido (Orochimaru?) drops major funds on Shikako’s research and she goes and recruits her friends because THIS IS A ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY, GUYS, COME ON. And, well, even if it turns out to be looking at a bunch of rocks that is a lot of money and they could use  a distraction etc. etc.

Except, you know, instead of rocks it’s an entire slowly dying nation because the secret behind the Gelel stones have been forgotten.

Like in Atlantis, Haido/Orochimaru does also hire an entire division of soldiers (nameless thugs with either Temujin or Kabuto as second in command) who do the whole “seize the power crystals/princess and auction the livelihood of the nation off to the highest bidder” thing. But I mean. A bunch of nameless thugs versus Konoha Twelve? Come on.

Sorry anon, I know it doesn’t really match the title, but I just really love that movie and this fusion was the only thing that even vaguely satisfied the constant poking and prodding at your prompt.

[berezina]

Alvin was lying in bed and still in pajamas at four in the afternoon on that January day when Monty first dropped by to see him and to dare ask the question whose answer none of us exactly knew—'How the hell did you manage to lose a leg?' Since Alvin had been so uncompanionable when I got home from school, responding with a grunt of disgust to whatever I offered to cheer him up, I hardly expected our least lovable relative to elicit any response at all.

But the intimidating presence of Uncle Monty, with the ever-present cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, was such that not even Alvin, in those early days, could tell him to shut up and go away. On that particular afternoon Alvin couldn't begin to mimic the brash defiance that had enabled him to hop like a marvel across the Penn Station concourse upon arriving back home as an amputee.

'France,' Alvin hollowly replied to the big question.

'Worst country in the world,' Monty told him, and with no lack of certainty. As a twenty-one-year-old in the summer of 1918, Monty had himself fought in France against the Germans in the second bloody Battle of the Marne, and then in the Argonne Forest when the Allies broke through on the Germans' western front, and so, of course, he knew everything about France.

'I'm not asking you where,' Monty said, 'I'm asking you how.'

'How,' repeated Alvin.

'Spit it out, kid. It'll do you good.'

He knew that too—what would do Alvin good.

'Where were you,' he asked, when you got hit? And don't tell me 'the wrong place'. All your life you been in the wrong place.'

'We were waiting for the boat to get us out.'

Here he closed his eyes as though hoping never to open them again. But instead of stopping right there, as I was praying for him to do—'Shot a German,' he suddenly said.

'And?' said Monty.

'He was out there screaming for the rest of the night.'

'So? So? Go on. So he was screaming. So what?'

'So near dawn, before the boat's due in, I crawled over to where he was. Maybe fifty yards away. By then he was already dead. But I crawled around to the top of him and I shot him twice in the head. Then I spit on the son of a bitch. And in that second they threw the grenade. I got it in both legs. One one of my legs the foot was twisted around. Broken and twisted. They put a cast on it. They straightened it out. But the other was gone. I looked down and I saw one foot backwards and one leg dangling. The left leg just about amputated already.'

There it was, and nothing like the heroic reality that I had so shallowly imagined.

'Out in no man's land all alone,' Monty told him, 'could be you were hit by one of your own. It's not yet light, it's half-light, a guy hears gunfire, he panics—bingo, he yanks the pin.'

As for that surmise, Alvin had nothing to say.

Anyone else might have understood and relented, if only because of the perspiration beading Alvin's forehead and the droplets pooled in the hollow of his throat and the fact that he still wouldn't open his eyes. But not my uncle—he understands and doesn't relent. 'And how come you didn't get left there? After pulling that stunt, how come they didn't just leave you to die?'

'There was mud everywhere' was Alvin's vacant reply. 'The ground was mud. All I remember is that there was mud.'

'Who saved you, misfit?'

'They took me. I must have been out of it. Came and took me.'

'I'm trying to picture your brain, Alvin, and I can't. Spits. He spits. And that's the story of how he loses a leg.'

'Some things you don't know why you do them.' It was I who was speaking. What did I know? But I was telling my uncle, 'You just do them, Uncle Monty. You can't not.'

'You can't not, Phillie, when you're a professional misfit.' To Alvin he said, 'So now what? You going to lay there living off disability checks? You going to live like a sharpie off your luck? Or would you maybe consider supporting yourself like the rest of us dumb mortals do? There's a job at the market for you when you're up out of bed. You start at the bottom, hosing down the floor and grading tomatoes, you start at the bottom with the buggy-luggers and the schleppers, but there's a job there working for me, and a paycheck every week. You pocket half the take at the Esso station, but I'll go with you anyway because you're still Jack's kid, and for my brother Jack I do anything. I wouldn't be where I am without Jack. Jack taught me the produce business and then he died. Just like Steinheim wanted to teach you the building business. But nobody can teach you, misfit. Throw the keys in Steinheim's face. Too big for Abe Steinheim. Only Hitler is big enough for Alvin Roth.'

In the kitchen, in a drawer with the potholders and the oven thermometer, my mother kept a long stiff needle and heavy thread to truss up the Thanksgiving turkey after it was stuffed. It was the only instrument of torture, aside from the wringer, that I could think of that we owned, and I wanted to go in and get it and use it to shut my uncle's mouth.

At the bedroom door, before leaving for the market, Monty turned back to summarize. Bullies love to summarize. The redundant upbraiding summary—nothing to equal it outside the old-fashioned flogging. 'Your buddies risked everything to save you. Went in a dragged you out under fire. Didn't they? And for what? So you can play seven-card stud up at the schoolyard? So you can go back and pump gas and steal Simkowitz blind? You make every mistake in the book. Everything you do you do wrong. Even shooting Germans you do wrong. Why is that? Why do you throw keys at people? Why do you spit? Someone who is already dead—and you spit? Why? Because life wasn't handed to you on a silver platter like it was handed to the rest of the Roths? If it wasn't for Jack, Alvin, I wouldn't be standing here wasting my breath. There is nothing you have earned. Let's be clear about that. Nothing. For twenty-two years you have remained a disaster.  I'm doing this for your father, sonny, not for you. I'm doing it for your grandmother. 'Help the boy,' she tells me, so I'm helping you. Once you figure out how you want to make your fortune, come around on your pegleg and we'll talk.'

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler, even after Monty was out the back door and into his car and he could have unleashed his every evil thought. He was too far gone to roar that day. Or even to crack. Only I did, after he refused to open his eyes and look at me when I begged him to; only I cracked, alone later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be aprt from the living and all that they cannot not do.

~Philip Roth [buy]

[americafuneral10-blog]

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

Originally Posted on The New York Times

First, the back story, because, B.J. Miller has found, the back story is unavoidable when you are missing three limbs.

Miller was a sophomore at Princeton when, one Monday night in November 1990, he and two friends went out for drinks and, at around 4 a.m., found themselves ambling toward a convenience store for sandwiches. They decided to climb a commuter train parked at the adjacent rail station, for fun. Miller scaled it first. When he got to the top, electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs. When his friends reached him on the roof of the train, smoke was rising from his feet.

Miller remembers none of this. His memories don't kick in until several days later, when he woke up in the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center, in Livingston, N.J. Thinking he'd resurfaced from a terrible dream, he tried to shamble across his hospital room on the charred crusts of his legs until he used up the slack of his catheter tube and the device tore out of his body. Then, all the pain hit him at once.

Doctors took each leg just below the knee, one at a time. Then they turned to his arm, which triggered in Miller an even deeper grief. ("Hands do stuff," he explains. "Your foot is just a stinky, clunky little platform.") For weeks, the hospital staff considered him close to death. But Miller, in a devastated haze, didn't know that. He only worried about who he would be when he survived.

For a long time, no visitors were allowed in his hospital room; the burn unit was a sterile environment. But on the morning Miller's arm was going to be amputated, just below the elbow, a dozen friends and family members packed into a 10-foot-long corridor between the burn unit and the elevator, just to catch a glimpse of him as he was rolled to surgery. "They all dared to show up," Miller remembers thinking. "They all dared to look at me. They were proving that I was lovable even when I couldn't see it." This reassured Miller, as did the example of his mother, Susan, a polio survivor who has used a wheelchair since Miller was a child: She had never seemed diminished. After the operation, when Miller was rolled through the hallway again, he opened his eyes as he passed her and said: "Mom, Mom. Now you and me have more in common."

  It wasn't that Miller was suddenly enlightened; internally, he was in turmoil. But in retrospect, he credits himself with doing one thing right: He saw a good way to look at his situation and committed to faking that perspective, hoping that his genuine self might eventually catch up. Miller refused, for example, to let himself believe that his life was extra difficult now, only uniquely difficult, as all lives are. He resolved to think of his suffering as simply a "variation on a theme we all deal with -- to be human is really hard," he says. His life had never felt easy, even as a privileged, able-bodied suburban boy with two adoring parents, but he never felt entitled to any angst; he saw unhappiness as an illegitimate intrusion into the carefree reality he was supposed to inhabit. And don't we all do that, he realized. Don't we all treat suffering as a disruption to existence, instead of an inevitable part of it? He wondered what would happen if you could "reincorporate your version of reality, of normalcy, to accommodate suffering." As a disabled person, he was getting all kinds of signals that he was different and separated from everyone else. But he worked hard to see himself as merely sitting somewhere on a continuum between the man on his deathbed and the woman who misplaced her car keys, to let his accident heighten his connectedness to others, instead of isolating him. This was the only way, he thought, to keep from hating his injuries and, by extension, himself.

Miller returned to Princeton the following year. He had three prosthetics and rode around campus in a golf cart with a rambunctious service dog named Vermont who, in truth, was too much of a misfit to perform any concrete service. Miller had wanted to work in foreign relations, in China; now he started studying art history. He found it to be a good lens through which to keep making sense of his injuries.

First, there was the discipline's implicit conviction that every work is shaped by the viewer's perspective. He remembers looking at slides of ancient sculptures in a dark lecture hall, all of them missing arms or noses or ears, and suddenly recognizing them for what they were: fellow amputees. "We were, as a class, all calling these works monumental, beautiful and important, but we'd never seen them whole," he says. Time's effect on these marble bodies -- their suffering, really -- was understood as part of the art. Medicine didn't think about bodies this way, Miller realized. Embedded in words like "disability" and "rehabilitation" was a less generous view: "There was an aberrant moment in your life and, with some help, you could get back to what you were, or approximate it." So, instead of regarding his injuries as something to get over, Miller tried to get into them, to see his new life as its own novel challenge, like traveling through a country whose language he didn't speak.

This positivity was still mostly aspirational. Miller spent years repulsed by the "chopped meat" where his arm ended and crushed with shame when he noticed people wince or look away. But he slowly became more confident and playful. He replaced the sock-like covering many amputees wear over their arm stumps with an actual sock: first a plain sock, then stripes and argyles. Then, one day he forgot to put on any sock and -- just like that -- "I was done with it. I was no longer ashamed of my arm." He became fascinated by architects like Louis Sullivan, who stripped the veneer off their buildings and let the strength of their construction shine through. And suddenly, the standard-issue foam covers he'd been wearing over his prosthetics seemed like a clunky charade -- Potemkin legs. The exquisitely engineered artificial limbs they hid were actually pretty interesting, even sexy, made of the same carbon fiber used as a finish on expensive sports cars. "Why not tear that stuff off and delight in what actually is?" Miller recalled thinking. So he did.

For years Miller collected small, half-formed insights like these. Then, he entered medical school and discovered palliative care, an approach to medicine rooted in similar ideas. He now talks about his recovery as a creative act, "a transformation," and argues that all suffering offers the same opportunity, even at the end of life, which gradually became his professional focus. "Parts of me died early on," he said in a recent talk. "And that's something, one way or another, we can all say. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left."

One morning in July 2015, Miller took his seat at a regular meeting of palliative-care doctors at the University of California San Francisco's cancer center. The head of the team, Dr. Michael Rabow, started with a poem. It was a tradition, he later told me, meant to remind everyone that this was a different sort of hour in their schedule, and that, as palliative-care physicians, they were seeking different outcomes for their patients: things like comfort, beauty and meaning. The poem was called "Sinkhole," and it seemed to offer some sneaky, syntactically muddled wisdom about letting go. When it was over, there was a beat of silence. (It was kind of a confusing poem.) Then Rabow encouraged everyone to remember any patients who had died since their last meeting. Miller was the first to speak up.

Miller, now 45, with deep brown eyes and a scruffy, silver-threaded beard, saw patients one day a week at the hospital. He was also entering his fifth year as executive director of a small, pioneering hospice in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, which originated as a kind of compassionate improvisation at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, when members of the San Francisco Zen Center began taking in sick, often stigmatized young men and doing what they could to help them die comfortably. It is now an independent nonprofit group that trains volunteers for San Francisco's Laguna Honda public hospital as well as for its own revered, small-scale residential operation. (Two of the facility's six beds are reserved for U.C.S.F., which sends patients there; the rest are funded through sliding-scale fees and private donations.) Once an outlier, Zen Hospice has come to embody a growing nationwide effort to reclaim the end of life as a human experience instead of primarily a medical one. The goal, as Miller likes to put it, is to "de-pathologize death."

Around the table at U.C.S.F., Miller stood out. The other doctors wore dress pants and button-downs -- physician-casual -- while he wore a sky blue corduroy shirt with a tear in the sleeve and a pair of rumpled khakis; he could have come straight from camping or Bonnaroo. Even just sitting there, he transmitted a strange charisma -- a magnetism, people kept telling me, that was hard to explain but also necessary to explain, because the rapport Miller seems to instantly establish with everyone is a part of his gift as a clinician.

"It's reasonable to say that it's impossible to describe what it feels like to be with him," Rabow told me. "People feel accepted. I think they feel loved." It's in the way Miller seems to swaddle you in his attention, the way his goofiness punctures any pretensions. (Miller, who has an unrepentant knucklehead side, habitually addresses other men as "Brother man" or "Mon" and insisted to me many times that he hasn't finished a book in 20 years.) For people who know him, his magic has almost become an exasperating joke. When I spoke to Miller's childhood friend Justin Burke, he told me a story about Miller running around on a beach with his dog in San Francisco years ago. A man came hobbling over and explained that he was about to have his own leg amputated and that just watching Miller run around like this, on two prosthetics, had instantaneously reassured him that he was going to be O.K. I told Burke to hang on: Someone at Zen Hospice had already told me this story, except that in her version, Miller was running on a trail in Texas. "Ask him how many times it's happened," Burke deadpanned.

Now Miller also seemed to be on the cusp of modest celebrity. He'd started speaking about death and dying at medical schools and conferences around the country and will soon surface in Oprah's living room, chatting about palliative care on her "Super Soul Sunday" TV show. Several of Miller's colleagues described him to me as exactly the kind of public ambassador their field needed. "What B.J. accomplishes is to talk about death without making it sound scary and horrible," Rita Charon, a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical School, says. "We know from seeing him standing in front of us that he has suffered. We know that he has been at the brink of the abyss that he's talking about. That gives him an authority that others may not have." Vicki Jackson, the chief of palliative care at Massachusetts General Hospital, agreed. Nobody welcomes conversations about dying, she said, not even about making the experience less miserable. "But people will listen to B.J.," she said. "They want to."

Jackson pointed to the talk Miller gave to close the TED conference in 2015. Miller described languishing in a windowless, antiseptic burn unit after his amputations. He heard there was a blizzard outside but couldn't see it himself. Then a nurse smuggled him a snowball and allowed him to hold it. This was against hospital regulations, and this was Miller's point: There are parts of ourselves that the conventional health care system isn't equipped to heal or nourish, adding to our suffering. He described holding that snowball as "a stolen moment," and said, "But I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin, the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet, in this universe, mattered more to me than whether I lived or died." Miller's talk has been watched more than five million times. And yet, Jackson told me: "If I said all that -- 'Oh, I could feel the coldness of the snowball …' -- you'd be like: 'Shut. Up. Shut up!' But no one is going to question B.J."

Now, at the morning meeting, Miller began describing the case of a young man named Randy Sloan, a patient at U.C.S.F. who died of an aggressive cancer a few weeks earlier at Zen Hospice. In a way, Sloan's case was typical. It passed through all the same medical decision points and existential themes the doctors knew from working with their own terminal patients. But here, the timeline was so compressed that those themes felt distilled and heightened.

And then there was the bracing idiosyncrasy of everything Miller's staff had been able to do for Sloan at Zen Hospice. Rabow told me that all palliative-care departments and home-hospice agencies believe patients' wishes should be honored, but Zen Hospice's small size allows it to "actualize" these ideals more fully. When Miller relayed one detail about Sloan's stay at the hospice -- it was either the part about the sailing trip or the wedding -- one doctor across the conference table expelled what seemed to be an involuntary, admiring, "What?"

Everything Miller was saying had a way of sharpening an essential set of questions: What is a good death? How do you judge? In the end, what matters? You got the sense that looking closely at Sloan's case might even get you close to some answers or, at least, less hopelessly far away.

This is the story he told.

It started with an email late one night, in April 2015. "I'm the mother of Randy Sloan," a woman named Melany Baldwin wrote to Miller. She reminded Miller how he met her son the previous year. And then: "Anyway, last week my dear son was diagnosed with mesothelioma," a rare, terminal cancer. "We are devastated. He is only 27 years old."

Miller got emails, texts and calls like this almost daily from friends, friends of friends or total strangers. And he put pressure on himself to help as much as he could. But it was also exhausting, and he put equal and opposing pressure on himself to live his own life fully -- a byproduct of his extreme intimacy with mortality. "The lessons I get from my patients and their families, and from this work," Miller said, "is to enjoy this big, huge, mystical, crazy, beautiful, wacky world. And I'm too often not doing that. That can feel distressing to me." A few months earlier, Miller had another brush with death -- a pancreatic-cancer scare that turned out to be nothing -- and he told me that "it was interesting to watch myself play with that thought. Where my mind went was: 'Cool. Now I get to quit all this work.' " Maybe he would just disappear, get weird, grow weed.

And so, as it happens, Miller didn't get Baldwin's email for several days, because he'd decided to experiment with going off the grid. He went on a weeklong, aimless road trip around the West with his mutt, Maysie, riding shotgun, and he rode his treasured motorcycle -- a sleek, black, heavily customized Aprilia -- up to Sonoma for a weekend with old friends. He was pulled over for speeding on the bike twice. The first cop approached a little freaked out; unable to compute a one-limbed man riding a motorcycle, he mistook Miller's prosthetic arm for a weapon.

"I love bikes," Miller told me. "I love gyroscopic, two-wheel action!" Mountain biking had become his way of releasing pressure in the turbulent decade after his accident. (Miller sued Princeton and New Jersey Transit, which operated the train, charging that they failed to make safety upgrades after similar accidents in the past. He won settlements totaling nearly $6 million, but was blindsided when some in the press excoriated him as a symbol of America's binge-drinking youth and their lack of personal responsibility.) He had returned to cycling quickly, tooling around trails with a specialized arm clipped to the handlebar and two prosthetics pedaling. It allowed him to be alone without being lonely, to remind himself that his life still allowed for adventure and risk. Soon, he was wandering into motorcycle dealerships, explaining how badly he wanted to get back on a motorcycle too, asking if anyone could build him one. But for years, none of the mechanics Miller approached would touch the idea: Engineering a machine for a triple-amputee seemed nearly impossible, the potential liability too great.

Then, in late 2013, Miller checked out Scuderia West, a boutique motorcycle shop not far from Zen Hospice, in the Mission District. Scuderia was staffed by a crew of young, wisecracking gear-heads, who, after finishing their shifts, stayed late drinking beer and rehabilitating decrepit old bikes for fun. Right away, Miller noticed a different vibe. They were excited by the challenge of retrofitting a bike for him. This was especially true of the young tech who ultimately volunteered to take the project: Melany Baldwin's son, Randy Sloan.

Sloan grew up in Texas. He was bald, with a bushy, reddish beard and a disarming, contented smile. His social life in San Francisco revolved around Scuderia, and he was the baby of the group: not just younger, but more sensitive and trusting. "He was way too nice to work here," his friend and co-worker Katie Putman told me. Sloan's closest relationship may have been with his dog, a husky named Desmo, whom he rescued from a disreputable breeder. The dog was weird-looking: It had one blue eye and one eye that was half-brown and half-blue. ("He would always select the misfit," Baldwin said.)

Sloan threw himself into overhauling a bike for Miller. For six months, he confronted a cascade of problems -- like how to run all the controls to a single handlebar so Miller could accelerate and brake with one hand -- while Miller made excuses to check in on his progress. "It was just an immediate man crush," Miller told me. "The guy was helping me build this dream."

Sloan was feeling it, too. Everyone at Scuderia was. They stalked Miller online, learning about his career at Zen Hospice. His work with the dying impressed them as fearless, just as his conviction to ride a motorcycle again did. Sloan never carried on about people or even talked that much, but he frequently referred to Miller as "a legend," and those close to him knew what that meant. "There were not many 'legends' in Randy's eyes," Putman said.

Sloan finished Miller's motorcycle in April 2014. A crowd gathered at Scuderia to watch Miller take possession. Sloan had him climb on, then clambered around and under the bike, making final adjustments. Then he stepped back and started, quietly, to cry.

Miller was tearing up under his helmet, too. But he didn't drag things out. He started the engine, said thank you, then streaked down the alleyway at the back of the shop. Everyone hollered and applauded as they watched him disappear down Valencia Street -- very fast, but with a pronounced, unsettling wobble.

Miller had been lying. He'd never ridden a motorcycle before.

A year later, Miller got Melany Baldwin's email. Once he was back from his road trip, he contacted Sloan's doctors at U.C.S.F. to learn more about his case.

Sloan was walking Desmo up a hill a few weeks earlier, in April, and found he couldn't catch his breath. He was rushed into surgery, to fix an apparent collapsed lung. But the surgeon discovered a raft of tumors spread across his lung, diaphragm and heart: mesothelioma. The diagnosis alone was improbable. Mesothelioma is typically seen in older people, after long-term asbestos or radiation exposure. And the way the cancer was moving through Sloan's body was shocking. A subsequent PET scan revealed it had already spread to his pancreas and brain.

His doctors at U.C.S.F. believed the tumor on his brainstem would paralyze him within weeks. And so, Sloan underwent whole-brain radiation to shrink it before attacking everything else. He didn't want to be cut off from his body -- he wanted to be as much like his old self as possible. "I'm sick of being sick, and I'm sick of talking about being sick," he kept telling his mother. He insisted that she go back home to Illinois while he returned to the small apartment he shared with two roommates, waiting to start chemo.

The next two weeks were grim. Tumors crusted over Sloan's heart, hindering it from pumping blood through his body. His capillaries began seeping water into his tissues. Soon, his feet were literally leaking, and the retained water cracked his skin from the shins down, mashing him with pain. Sloan's ankles grew as wide as logs. He started walking with a cane. And because the pain in his torso kept him from lying down or even sitting comfortably, one night he fell asleep standing up and cut his head open when he collapsed.

Putman, Sloan's friend from Scuderia, had swept in to take care of Desmo, the husky. Now she transitioned into Sloan's de facto nurse. But Sloan was a bad patient. He played down his condition and seemed to resent Putman's help, out of shame or guilt. Several times, Putman told me, she had to race to his apartment and take him to the emergency room: "I started calling it our date night." Finally, she asked Sloan if she should just sleep over. Sloan accepted her offer this way: "I think Desmo would like that."

Early in June, Sloan was readmitted to U.C.S.F., and Baldwin, his mother, returned to San Francisco to be with him. Miller saw both of them for an appointment that morning, and when he walked in, it hit him how quickly Sloan's body was failing: In roughly six weeks, Sloan had gone from a functioning, happy 27-year-old, walking his dog up a hill, to very clearly dying. His decline was relentless, by any standard. At no point had any doctor been able to give him a single bit of good news. Even now, Sloan's oncologist was reporting that after the first dose of chemotherapy, his heart was likely too frail to take more.

Still, Sloan talked to Miller about "doing battle" with the cancer and "winning this thing"; about getting back to work at Scuderia and flying to Illinois, where Baldwin would remarry later that summer. He also wanted to go to Tokyo Disneyland, he said. Miller looked at Sloan, then looked at Baldwin, trying to intuit who knew what and who might have been pretending not to know and how best to gently reconcile everyone's hopes with the merciless reality.

Good palliative-care doctors recognize there's an art to navigating clinical interactions like this, and Miller seems particularly sensitive to its subtleties. In this case, Miller realized, his job was to "disillusion" Sloan without devastating him. Hope is a tricky thing, Miller told me. Some terminal patients keep chasing hope through round after round of chemo. But it's amazing how easily others "re-proportion," or recalibrate, their expectations: how the hope of making it to a grandchild's birthday or finishing "Game of Thrones" becomes sufficiently meaningful. "The question becomes," Miller says, "how do you incorporate those hard facts into your moment-by-moment life instead of trying to run away from them?"

At an initial appointment with Sloan, two weeks earlier, Miller made the calculation not to steer Sloan toward any crushing realizations. He worried that if he pushed too hard, Sloan might feel alienated and shut down. ("I needed his allegiance," Miller later explained; it was more important, in the long term, that Sloan see him as an advocate.) At the second meeting, Miller remembered, "I felt the need to be more brutal." And, he imagined, by now Sloan would have started to suspect that the story he'd been telling himself didn't fit the reality. "I just said, 'Randy, this is not going like any of us want for you,' " and Miller began, calmly, to level with him.

Traveling was out of the question, Miller explained; best guess, Sloan had a few months to live. "You could just watch his world collapse," Miller recalled. "With each sentence, you're taking another possibility away." Sloan started crying. And yet, Baldwin also knew that her son had been waiting for his doctors to say this out loud. Sloan couldn't understand why, if he had Stage 4 of an incurable cancer, he was still taking 70 pills every day, with the doses laid out in a dizzying flowchart. And as Miller went on, he was stunned by how well Sloan seemed to be absorbing this new information, without buckling under its weight. "He was actually kind of keeping up with his grief, reconciling the facts of his life," he says. "It was a moving target, and he kept hitting it." Baldwin told me: "Randy was a simple guy. He would say to me, 'Mom, all I want is one ordinary day.' " He was sick of being sick -- just like he'd been saying. He wanted to go back to living, as best he could.

Quickly the conversation turned to what was next. A standard question in palliative care is "What's important to you now?" But Sloan didn't muster much of a response, so Miller retooled the question. He told Sloan that nothing about his life was going the way he expected, and his body was only going to keep breaking down. "So, what's your favorite part of yourself? What character trait do we want to make sure to protect as everything else falls apart?" Sloan had an immediate answer for this one. "I love everybody I've ever met," he said.

Baldwin had heard her son say this before, with total earnestness. And he said it with such conviction now that Miller immediately believed it, too. Besides, Miller had already felt it to be true, a year earlier, when he drove his motorcycle away from Sloan at Scuderia. "He was an amazing person that way," Miller told me.

Sloan got apprehensive when Miller started telling him about Zen Hospice's residential facility, known as the Guest House; it sounded as if it was for old people. But Miller explained that it was probably the best chance he had for living the last act of his life the way he wanted. His other options were to tough it out at home with two weekly visits from a home hospice nurse or go to a nursing home. At Zen Hospice, Sloan's friends would always be welcome, and Sloan could come and go as he pleased as long as someone went with him. He could eat what he wanted. He could step out for a cigarette. He could even walk up the street and smoke on his own stoop -- the Guest House was just two blocks from Sloan's apartment. Besides, Miller told him: "It's where I work. I'll be there."

Sloan agreed but didn't seem entirely comfortable with the idea. He told one of his friends from Scuderia: "I'm moving in with B.J."

Sloan arrived at the Guest House with his mother five days later, on the morning of June 9. He insisted on walking there, trundling the two blocks from his apartment with his cane.

The Guest House is a calm, unpretentious space: a large Victorian home with six beds in five bedrooms, vaulted ceilings, slightly shabby furniture and warm, Oriental rugs. There is a large wooden Buddha in the dining room. The kitchen is light-filled and bursting with flowers. There's always a pot of tea and often freshly baked cookies. And while Zen Hospice has a rotating, 24-hour nursing staff, the tiny nursing station is literally tucked into a kind of cabinet in the hall upstairs; the house, in other words, feels very much like a house, not a hospital.

You don't have to spend much time there to realize that the most crucial, and distinctive, piece of the operation is its staff of volunteers. Freed of most medical duties by the nursing staff, the volunteers act almost as existential nurses. They sit with residents and chat, offering their full attention, unencumbered by the turmoil a family member might feel. The volunteers are ordinary people: retired Macy's executives, social workers, bakers, underemployed millennials or kibitzing empty-nesters. Many are practicing Buddhists. Many are not. (Miller isn't.) But Buddhism informs their training. There's an emphasis on accepting suffering, on not getting tripped up by one's own discomfort around it. "You train people not to run away from hard things, not to run away from the suffering of others," Miller explained. This liberates residents to feel whatever they're going to feel in their final days, even to fall apart.

At first, many volunteers experience a confused apprehension. They arrive expecting nonstop, penetrating metaphysical conversations with wise elderly people and instead just wind up plying them for recipes or knitting advice or watching "Wheel of Fortune" with them or restocking latex gloves for the Guest House nurses. But one especially well-liked volunteer, Josh Kornbluth, told me that, after a year working at the Guest House, he understood that the value of Zen Hospice is actually "in the quotidian -- the holding of someone's hand, bringing them food that's been beautifully arranged on the plate, all the small ways of showing respect to that person as a living person and not as 'predeceased.' Those are actually deep things. And I say that as the least Zen person!" In fact, Kornbluth was raised by Jewish Communists in New York City, and once, after a woman died at the Guest House and no more-senior volunteer was on hand to take charge, I watched him -- adrenalized, uneasy, perspiring -- fumble around on his iPhone for something to say over the body before they wheeled it away, then mangle the pronunciation of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Sloan didn't appreciate any of this at first; the Guest House creeped him out. Shortly after he arrived, a nurse showed him to one of the smaller rooms at the top of the stairs: "Bed 5," it was called. It had a twin bed, an ornate wooden chest and a large framed photo of a Tibetan boy in a red robe. The rest of the rooms were occupied by old ladies: one who spoke no English and kept her television tuned to blaring Russian talk shows; a retired teacher in the final throes of cervical cancer; an unflappable, perpetually crocheting 99-year-old who had recently gained back some weight and taken to playing piano and who, everyone suspected, wasn't actually dying anymore. Sloan worried that he had exiled himself to a nursing home, and nothing he was seeing now reassured him. He told his mother he needed to "take a day off." Then he went downstairs and walked back to his apartment. The staff of Zen Hospice, considering it part of their job to accept his trepidation, let him go.

He returned the next morning. He was ready to move in now, he said, and came trailed by a swarm of friends who'd tossed his possessions into boxes and were now hauling them up the Guest House stairs. They started hammering things into walls, mounting Sloan's flat-screen television, wiring his stereo and gaming console, claiming unused furniture from elsewhere in the Guest House. Soon the room was filled with Sloan's motorcycle-racing posters and helmets and a small garden gnome lying in a provocative position. Erin Singer, the house's kitchen manager at the time, loved watching it happen. "All of a sudden, it was a late-20s-dude's room," she said.

Once Sloan was settled, the feeling was one of profound relief. His little collective had been caring for him as best they could. But now he had chefs eager to cook for him and nurses and volunteers to ensure that he was comfortable. His mother and his friends didn't have to nag him about taking his pain medication anymore or try, ineptly, to clean and dress the wounds on his feet that caused him such shame. Baldwin told me, "At Zen, they talk about being unburdened and unburdening." And that's what happened: They could just be Sloan's mother and friends again, and Sloan no longer had to be their patient, either.

From then on, throngs of co-workers and friends passed through the Guest House. Desmo, the dog, hung out, too. "His entourage was either one-deep or 10-deep," Jolene Scarella, then the director of nursing, told me. They sat around playing video games and drinking Bud Light, just like they always did, or they swept Sloan around the city for dinner at his favorite restaurants. The Guest House isn't a somber place, but still, the volunteers weren't accustomed to this level of freewheeling autonomy or raucousness or youth. "They brought so much joy to the house," Singer said. And yet, some volunteers also had a hard time shaking the acute tragedy of Sloan's case. All that Buddhist, contemplative nonattachment was easier to buy into with the elderly; with Sloan, it was hard to feel as if you were helping someone transition through a cosmic crescendo at the end of a life well lived. Some of the staff, like Singer, were only slightly older than Sloan. Others had children his age. It felt cruel.

Sloan's body, meanwhile, continued to fail faster than anyone had anticipated. Within days, breathing became more onerous and the weeping ulcerations on his feet became rawer; there was blood draining from his right foot now, and a terrible odor. On Thursday, just three days after Sloan arrived, he needed to transition from OxyContin to methadone.

The next day, he went wedding-dress shopping. Baldwin and her fiancé had scrapped their wedding plans in Illinois. But a chaplain at U.C.S.F. volunteered to perform the ceremony at the tiny park next to the Guest House instead, and Singer offered to throw together a little reception inside. For Sloan, the best man, planning the wedding with his mother became a fun distraction. He was too swollen to wear a suit, but found a purple-and-gold velour tracksuit he liked online -- the tuxedo of sweatsuits, called a "Sweatsedo." Baldwin ordered one with "Randy" embroidered on the breast.

The wedding was scheduled for the following Thursday. The Friday before, Sloan's fourth day at the Guest House, Baldwin drove him to a David's Bridal and helped him arrange himself on a chair. He seemed much foggier all of a sudden. As she came out of the dressing room, modeling each gown, Sloan mostly managed a thumbs up or thumbs down.

That night, Baldwin called Sloan's sisters in Texas and his father in Tennessee and said that it didn't seem as if Randy had months anymore, or even weeks. She told them to come right away.

Miller hardly saw Sloan at the Guest House. As Zen Hospice's executive director, he was consumed by fund-raising and strategic planning or throttled by administrative work. The week Sloan arrived, Miller was courting producers from "60 Minutes," hoping they would do a segment on the Guest House, and meeting with the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, which he had retained to help put Zen Hospice forward as a national model for end-of-life care. IDEO, meanwhile, was calling Miller to consult on its own projects -- helping entrepreneurs disrupt what some had taken to calling the "death space."

And yet, Miller's rising prominence made him uneasy. "If I want to keep doing this work, I have to be seeing patients," he told me. "It's really easy to get unhelpfully abstract." In short, he was spending too much time in the wrong death space.

Still, it wasn't that Miller was too busy to visit with Sloan. He stopped by his room a couple of times, early on, but eventually made a therapeutic decision to keep his distance. It was obvious to Miller that he upset the fragile sense of normalcy that Sloan and his friends were managing to create. As soon as Miller poked his head in, someone from Scuderia would start retelling the motorcycle story, saying how much Sloan loved building that bike for him, how he was "a legend." "No one knew what to say," Miller remembered. "Their suffering was palpable, and some of their suffering was these spastic efforts to put a smiley face on things."

It was also easy to wonder how much of Sloan's own composure was projected for their benefit. A friend from the shop, Steve Magri, told me that even when Sloan was healthy, "he would never let you feel uncomfortable around him." Moreover, the whole-brain radiation had clearly changed Sloan, sent him deeper within himself. The pain medication had, too. He occasionally said things that even he seemed surprised by or that seemed ludicrously out of character. He had always been a vulnerable, childlike man, but there were moments, in his last days, when his mother couldn't tell whether he'd achieved some higher state of openheartedness or was just disoriented. At one point, Sloan asked her to drive him to Scuderia so he could tell his boss, a friend, that he was sorry, but he probably wouldn't be coming back to work after all. "I hate to let you guys down," Sloan said tenderly, as if he were breaking this news for the first time.

I never met Randy Sloan. But as I heard these stories in the months after his death, it became impossible for me not to fixate on the unfathomability of his interior life, or anyone's interior life, at the end -- to wonder how well Sloan had come to terms with what was happening to him, how much agony he might have felt. Erin Singer, the kitchen manager, told me that Sloan seemed intent on keeping his distance from the Guest House. Usually, she said, he sat under a tree in the park next door, silently smoking a cigarette. And it struck Singer as significant that Sloan "didn't sit looking at the street or the garden. He always sat looking at the house," as if he was wrestling with what it would mean to go inside.

The question that was unsettling me was about regret: How sure was everyone that Sloan didn't have desires he would have liked to express or anguish he would have liked to work through -- and should someone have helped him express and work through them, instead of just letting him play video games with his friends? My real question, I guess, was: Is this all there is?

Later, when I admitted this to Miller, he told me he understood this kind of anxiety well, but was able, with practice, to resist it. "Learning to love not knowing," he said, "that's a key part of this story. Obviously, I don't know the depths of Randy's soul, either. Was Randy enlightened or did he just not have the right vocabulary for this, if any of us do? We'll never know. And maybe the difference between those things is unimportant. I think of it as: Randy got to play himself out."

This is a favorite phrase of Miller's. It means that Randy's ability to be Randy was never unnecessarily constrained. What Sloan chose to do with that freedom at the Guest House was up to him. Miller was suggesting that I'd misunderstood the mission of Zen Hospice. Yes, it's about wresting death from the one-size-fits-all approach of hospitals, but it's also about puncturing a competing impulse, the one I was scuffling with now: our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience. "Most people aren't having these transformative deathbed moments," Miller said. "And if you hold that out as a goal, they're just going to feel like they're failing." The truth was, Zen Hospice had done something almost miraculous: It had allowed Sloan and those who loved him to live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together, until Sloan's share of present moments ran out.

By Sloan's sixth day at Zen Hospice, he'd become unsteady on his feet and was falling asleep in the middle of sentences. But when a nurse went to check on him at the start of her shift that morning, he smirked mischievously and told her, "I have cancer, so my mom wants me to go sailing."

In truth, the trip was Sloan's idea. The Scuderia gang had a tradition of Sunday trips to Angel Island, a forested state park in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And so, that morning, they met on a dock in Sausalito, motored over, dropped anchor and started barbecuing and drinking Coronas -- a low-key "simulated rager," as one friend put it. Sloan barely spoke. He smiled occasionally. He pounded his pain medication. He returned to the Guest House that evening, sunburned and dehydrated and three hours later than he promised. (The nurses were upset, concerned mainly that Sloan could have been in pain all day.)

Then he went out to dinner. After days of driving, Sloan's father, Randy Senior -- Big Randy, everyone called him -- had reached San Francisco from Tennessee, and Sloan was adamant that the two of them get some food. They ate huge plates of eggs and hash browns at a nearby diner. Big Randy noticed that Sloan was struggling to grip his fork and that he ordered a beer but didn't touch it. Big Randy was recovering from foot surgery -- he was hobbled himself. So when they were finished, he found he had to prop Sloan against a tree outside while he staggered to the curb to hail a cab. "Like Laurel and Hardy," Big Randy said. Sloan, slumped against the tree trunk, lit a cigarette and couldn't stop laughing.

He died 36 hours later, early on Tuesday morning, his eighth day at the Guest House. Baldwin hadn't yet arrived for the day and Big Randy, who spent the night with his son, had just left to take a shower. Two nurses were changing Sloan's clothes when it happened, and one of them, Derrick Guerra, who'd grown particularly close to Sloan, told me that, until the last instant, he could feel the young man's hand gripping his arm. The strength still left in his body, Guerra said, was unreal.

Sloan's family arrived. Scuderia people arrived. As Sloan's body was wheeled through the Guest House garden toward the back gate, they all placed flower petals around his head and over his chest -- a ritual at Zen Hospice known as the Flower Petal Ceremony. Desmo, the husky, leapt up and licked his face.

"It was amazing," Miller was now telling the doctors around the table at U.C.S.F., summing up Sloan's story. And there was a postscript, too. Two days after Sloan died, Baldwin and her fiancé woke up and decided to go ahead with the wedding they'd planned, in the park next to the Guest House. Afterward, the hospice staff invited everyone in for what can only be described as a joint wedding-reception-funeral.

One staff member later told me that the Guest House felt a little like a house on Thanksgiving that day -- full and bustling, in a comforting way. Upstairs, the same women were still moving through the ends of their lives, each in her own way. But downstairs, there were tubs of beer and cheese plates and a handle of Jameson and someone playing guitar. Miller, who made a point of riding his motorcycle to work, invited Big Randy outside to see it. There were toasts to the happy couple. There were toasts to the dead young man. And there was his grieving mother in a new off-white gown.

The scene was all mixed up, upside-down and unexpectedly joyful, Miller told the doctors: If you'd walked in off the street, it would have been impossible to explain. "It makes you happy for a place like the Guest House where such things can happen," he said, "a roof where these things can coexist."

"Have you had many weddings?" one of the doctors asked.

"Not a ton," Miller joked. "We haven't put it in the brochure yet."

It was a Wednesday, the day Miller had his cancer clinic at the hospital, and he excused himself from the meeting to dash to another floor. His first patient, heavily medicated but still tearing up from pain in his spine and legs, fumbled through his symptoms and worries, still wondering how this had happened to him. Miller mostly listened and said things like: "There's nothing you could have done to cause this, pal. That's important for you to know." A lot of his patients were like this, he later told me. He couldn't do much for them, medically. "But I'm letting them know I see their suffering," he said. "That message helps somehow, some way, a little."

It did help, all morning. It was an astonishing thing to witness. Over the previous weeks, I noticed Miller struggling with his administrative role at Zen Hospice, looking depleted after a long lunch with a donor or while being talked at about options for optimizing the Guest House's automated phone directory. Now, he seemed in his element: the bedside was his natural habitat. When his next patient, a hunched older woman arrived, Miller started by asking her not just about her pain, sleep and meds but also about how she was doing since her dog died. "It's a big hole to fill in the heart," Miller told her. She whimpered, "The space is just so big." She seemed relieved just to admit that.

Not long after that, Miller decided to step down as Zen Hospice's executive director. He spent months trying to create the right part-time role for himself -- something less administrative and managerial that would get him back at people's bedsides again -- but finally resigned. He continued to see patients at U.C.S.F., began co-writing a kind of field guide to dying and started raising seed money for a dream of his, something he's calling the Center for Dying and Living: a combination "skunk works and design lab," as he puts it, to dig into more imaginative possibilities for palliative care. He also ramped up his public speaking, and as he traveled around the world, he usually did so wearing Randy Sloan's favorite, beat up belt, a gift from Sloan's mother. Only Miller, with his mischievously counterintuitive style of insight, his deep appreciation of one, maybe trite-sounding truth -- that the dying are still very much alive and we all are dying -- could have thought about Sloan's life, even the last phase of it, and decided, without hesitation, to wear that belt "for good luck."

He was still hopelessly busy, still chastened by the volume of good work he saw in front of him but couldn't do. But it felt right. Miller hadn't unburdened himself, exactly, but rearranged and rebalanced the weight. He was committing to the parts of himself that felt most meaningful and trying to shake free of all the other, unhelpful expectations. "It's the same thing I would counsel a patient," Miller told me. It's what he had counseled Randy Sloan.

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die published first on YouTube