Beyond Selidor

It'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:

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.

Miracle of miracles, I have the time and energy to do some book-logging on an actual Wednesday for once!

After the poll on my last post, I ended up reading The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain. The book was a lot of fun — it reminded me of the folklore encyclopedias I used to read as a child — moving around Britain and Northern Ireland, cataloguing various myths and legends associated with landmarks and other notable places. There were a lot of commonalities from region to region — standing stones and Neolithic tombs, portals to fairy otherworlds, supernatural dogs, various local people said to have made pacts with the Devil, witch trials, haunted manor houses and so on. It's history as written into the land, and as understood by people who didn't read, and who didn't travel widely — local history that recognises the priorities of such people.

I did think it was a bit cheeky to bill the book as a guide to Britain, and then devote 3/4 of the book to England, and the remaining 1/4 to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (the latter of which isn't even in Britain), though!

I continued my habit of reading short fiction during my lunchbreak in the office yesterday — just one story this time:

'Time: Marked and Mended' (Carrie Vaughn): Graff isn’t quite human. His people move through the galaxy collecting memories and experiences, recording their lives and passing them on. Then, one day, he breaks: he discovers a chunk of his memory is missing. This should be impossible—he’s never forgotten a moment in his life. Now, he has to learn to forget, and to remember, and this has consequences for all his people, his culture, and his whole world.

Matthias and I saw two films on the weekend, both of which had relationships between fathers and daughters at their heart, although there the similarities ended.

Troll is a deeply silly Norwegian film in which roadworks through a mountain awaken an ancient troll from its slumber, at which point it starts roaming the land and terrorising the people. An archaeologist and her folklorist father get roped into the government's response, and wacky scenarios ensue. If you saw the earlier Troll Hunter film, it has a similar vibe.

Aftersun is a meandering, melancholy film in which a father and his eleven-year-old daughter go on holiday in the 1990s to a beach resort in Turkey, and not much else happens. Piece by piece, their history and relationship get fleshed out in all their complicated, messy detail — it's clear that the father became a parent very young, that he is no longer together with the girl's mother (and possibly never was), and that he is having a difficult time. The girl, on the other hand, is poised on the threshold of adolescence and is equal parts curious, scared, and confused about what this might entail. What this film is about will depend on which character you believe is the protagnist — I have firm opinions about this, but it's the sort of thing that is better to work out on your own. It's got minimal dialogue, and the two actors work very well together.

On to yesterday's snowflake_challenge: In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.



I am really pleased at the reception of one of my four Yuletide fics from 2022, and at myself for pushing through and writing it. I've been participating in Yuletide for many years, and every year up to 2021, I wrote multiple treats in addition to my assigned gift. It was important to me to do this — I needed to feel as if I was putting in more to the exchange than I would necessarily get back, and I myself would be delighted to get additional treats so I wanted to give other exchange participants that opportunity. When 2021 rolled around, I was so burned out that I was only able to write my main assignment, and while this of course is the sole requirement of the exchange, I felt like I wasn't meeting the standards I set myself in terms of number of treats.

So I was relieved in 2022 to have my energy and inspiration return to me, meaning I was able to write three treats in addition to my main assignment. The last of these treats was one I wasn't sure I'd have the time and energy to do justice, but it ended up being the best received, which was a wonderful feeling, and a reminder that my own feelings of doubt should normally be ignored in these sorts of situations. This is the fic in question:

This marigold run (3037 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, Constantine (Sunshine), Yolande (Sunshine)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, 5+1 Things
Summary:

Five times Con gave Sunshine an object of power, and one time she returned the favour.

The level of engagement is obviously not huge if you're used to writing for megafandoms, but I only write for small book fandoms, and by those standards, this fic is doing well! (Especially considering it's for a book that was published in 2003, is standalone so will never get new installments, and generally only gets remembered around Yuletide.) Its reception made me really happy, and was a great note on which to end the fannish year and carry me through into 2023.

The weather this weekend has been miserable. I got completely drenched by deluges of rain both today and Friday morning when walking out to the swimming pool, and had to walk home in soaking wet clothes and shoes. However, freezing horizontal rain does at least make for a cosy setting in which to snuggle up at home, cooking, reading, and watching TV.

I've finished two books and am on the verge of starting another, Matthias and I have had various different sports playing on TV in the background (the only sport I really pay much attention to is gymnastics, but I find other sports make for a pleasant background noise, and I drift in and out of watching them), I've done a bit of meal prep for next week (I love cooking soup in wintry weather), and I'm just finishing catching up on various Dreamwidth comments.

Matthias and I don't stick to this religiously, but we frequently watch films on Saturday nights. Yesterday's film was Shiva Baby, about an underemployed and underachieving millennial woman who ends up at a shiva with (among others) her sugar daddy, his wife and baby, her high achieving ex-girlfriend, and her hypercritical mother. The whole film is only 70 minutes, and mainly consists of excruciatingly awkward conversations, mainly stemming from the fact that the various characters don't know how the other characters relate to the protagonist, and the fact that she's trying (and failing) to prevent them from figuring things out. It's extremely cleverly done, but don't watch it if you have a problem with secondhand embarassment!

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once_upon_fic signups are open! I'm still working on my letter and trying to finalise the fandoms I'll offer and request, but I should have it sorted out in the next couple of days. If you're interested in participating, you can see details of the schedule, tagset, and links to all the fandoms in the tagset (all fandoms need to have a public domain version available online in order to be nominated) here.

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This is the last weekend for a while where there are no demands on my time — we've got houseguests next week, and various other things happening each weekend for at least a month after that — so I'll enjoy the rest and relaxation while it lasts!

We watched Pacific Rim last night. While in some ways it's a deeply, deeply silly film (with obvious plot twists and characters who are little more than collections of tropes), it's also an incredibly important one. If anything deserves to be a successful summer blockbuster, it's Pacific Rim.

( Seven reasons why you should watch Pacific Rim. Warning: mild spoilers )

Rambling post about the notion of evil as explored in Dr Horrible and The Dark Knight, spoilers abound.

Ministry of Sound CDs listened to since last update: Sessions 2, discs 1 and 2; Sessions 3, discs 1 and 2; Sessions 4, discs 1 and 2; Sessions 5, discs 1 and 2; UK 2006 Annual, discs 1 and 2; US 2007 Annual, discs 1 and 2.