Wrapping up February
Feb. 26th, 2023 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It's something of a relief to say goodbye to this month, which is always my least favourite of the year (at least while living in the northern hemisphere). All my focus and productivity and sense of purpose from January leaches away, to be replaced by a kind of dull feeling that time is slipping away from me. At least the sun is back — it's been shining all day, and this morning it felt as if I were swimming directly into the dawn when I did my 1km of laps at the pool.
I had grand plans to read through the Candy Hearts Exchange collection and do a full recs post, but in the end I only read a handful of stuff that other people had recommended in their journals. I did enjoy the two following fics, though:
Smoke Immure Us, Light Offend (1833 words) by Triskaidekalogue
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Knives Out (Movies)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera, Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera & Phillip (Knives Out)
Characters: Helen Brand, Marta Cabrera, Phillip (Knives Out)
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Candy Hearts Exchange
Summary:
Full Tilt (300 words) by team_turtleneck
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Terminator (Movies), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Sarah Connor
Characters: Sarah Connor, Andy | Andromache of Scythia
Additional Tags: Banter
Summary:
I also particularly enjoyed this article about several feuding Greenwich Village local newspapers, which is Angry People in Local Newspapers taken to a meta level (given that the angry people in question actually run said local newspapers in this instance). The article is in the New York Times, so you may hit a paywall if you're not a subscriber or have read your quota of free articles this month. (Edited to add thatgingicat has shared a link to this story as a gift link in the comments of the post, so everyone should be able to read it for free that way. Thanks gingicat!)
Media-wise, I've read a book and a short story since I last posted, and watched one film.
The book was Waves Across the South (Sujit Sivasundaram), a history of the colonisation of the parts of the world contained within and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The focus is at once on these bodies of water and how they shaped the peoples and histories of these regions, and on European colonisation as counter-revolution, a reaction both to revolutionary currents within Europe and in the global south. I particularly appreciated the author's approach: rather than being chronological, each chapter had more of a geographic focus (so one centred on Madagascar, one on the Persian Gulf, one on Australia and so on), but there was also a really clear emphasis on the fact that the peoples of these various geographic regions responded not only to political and cultural changes in Europe, but also to those in other colonised regions.
The short story was 'The Counterworld' (James Bradley), and I feel a bit uncertain about my reaction to it. The description of the story makes its intention clear: A grieving mother wakes up to find all traces of her lost son have been erased as if he had never existed. Only in the hallway mirror is she able to see a glimpse of the reality she remembers having lived—the reality she wants back. But what it felt like to me was an absolutely spot-on depiction of gaslighting — it's not just that the 'grieving mother' of the story is the only one to remember that she has a dead son, but also that everyone refuses to believe her and behaves as if she is mentally ill and in need of medication and psychological therapy when she brings it up. I found this extremely upsetting to read, particularly because I wasn't sure the author was doing this deliberately — it felt more as if the writer was writing a science fiction thought experiment about a world where traumatic memories could be erased, but unintentionally wrote a real-world horror story.
Matthias and I resumed our Saturday evening film watching with Bullet Train — a silly and undemanding heist/gangster movie set on the eponymous train in which various different assassins end up on the same train with similar and interconnected missions. It's violent in a lurid, comic-book way, and (as is perhaps unsurprising for the director of Atomic Blonde) it's a lot of style over substance, but the style itself is fantastic. I found it to be fun, undemanding Saturday night fare, but do heed my warning about the violence, which I guess I would describe as Tarantino-esque.
Now I need to make a decision about how to spend the last few hours of the weekend. I already spent lunch outside with Matthias, eating Tibetan food from the market in the courtyard garden of our favourite local bar/cafe, so I've definitely taken some advantage of the sunshine. My brain isn't really in the right space for reading, but pottering around Dreamwidth, doing a bit of yoga, and possibly planting some of the vegetable seeds to germinate on the kitchen windowsills might be possible. We'll see.
I had grand plans to read through the Candy Hearts Exchange collection and do a full recs post, but in the end I only read a handful of stuff that other people had recommended in their journals. I did enjoy the two following fics, though:
Smoke Immure Us, Light Offend (1833 words) by Triskaidekalogue
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Knives Out (Movies)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera, Helen Brand & Marta Cabrera & Phillip (Knives Out)
Characters: Helen Brand, Marta Cabrera, Phillip (Knives Out)
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Candy Hearts Exchange
Summary:
Someone seems to be targeting not only Benoit Blanc, but also his partners-in-detection from recent cases... so they join forces. Together, can they fight solve deal with(???) crime?
Full Tilt (300 words) by team_turtleneck
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Terminator (Movies), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Sarah Connor
Characters: Sarah Connor, Andy | Andromache of Scythia
Additional Tags: Banter
Summary:
Andy leaves out an important detail.
I also particularly enjoyed this article about several feuding Greenwich Village local newspapers, which is Angry People in Local Newspapers taken to a meta level (given that the angry people in question actually run said local newspapers in this instance). The article is in the New York Times, so you may hit a paywall if you're not a subscriber or have read your quota of free articles this month. (Edited to add that
gingicat has shared a link to this story as a gift link in the comments of the post, so everyone should be able to read it for free that way. Thanks gingicat!)Media-wise, I've read a book and a short story since I last posted, and watched one film.
The book was Waves Across the South (Sujit Sivasundaram), a history of the colonisation of the parts of the world contained within and around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The focus is at once on these bodies of water and how they shaped the peoples and histories of these regions, and on European colonisation as counter-revolution, a reaction both to revolutionary currents within Europe and in the global south. I particularly appreciated the author's approach: rather than being chronological, each chapter had more of a geographic focus (so one centred on Madagascar, one on the Persian Gulf, one on Australia and so on), but there was also a really clear emphasis on the fact that the peoples of these various geographic regions responded not only to political and cultural changes in Europe, but also to those in other colonised regions.
The short story was 'The Counterworld' (James Bradley), and I feel a bit uncertain about my reaction to it. The description of the story makes its intention clear: A grieving mother wakes up to find all traces of her lost son have been erased as if he had never existed. Only in the hallway mirror is she able to see a glimpse of the reality she remembers having lived—the reality she wants back. But what it felt like to me was an absolutely spot-on depiction of gaslighting — it's not just that the 'grieving mother' of the story is the only one to remember that she has a dead son, but also that everyone refuses to believe her and behaves as if she is mentally ill and in need of medication and psychological therapy when she brings it up. I found this extremely upsetting to read, particularly because I wasn't sure the author was doing this deliberately — it felt more as if the writer was writing a science fiction thought experiment about a world where traumatic memories could be erased, but unintentionally wrote a real-world horror story.
Matthias and I resumed our Saturday evening film watching with Bullet Train — a silly and undemanding heist/gangster movie set on the eponymous train in which various different assassins end up on the same train with similar and interconnected missions. It's violent in a lurid, comic-book way, and (as is perhaps unsurprising for the director of Atomic Blonde) it's a lot of style over substance, but the style itself is fantastic. I found it to be fun, undemanding Saturday night fare, but do heed my warning about the violence, which I guess I would describe as Tarantino-esque.
Now I need to make a decision about how to spend the last few hours of the weekend. I already spent lunch outside with Matthias, eating Tibetan food from the market in the courtyard garden of our favourite local bar/cafe, so I've definitely taken some advantage of the sunshine. My brain isn't really in the right space for reading, but pottering around Dreamwidth, doing a bit of yoga, and possibly planting some of the vegetable seeds to germinate on the kitchen windowsills might be possible. We'll see.