3/5. Third book in this scifi trilogy, really do not start here.
Damn, it didn’t land it. It didn’t terribly fumble it either, but.
Let’s back up. I really liked the first book in this trilogy, which you should absolutely go into unspoiled because the ride is worth it. But she had to do different modes with the next books for plot and structure and not repeating herself reasons. Unfortunately, I was glad to see these people again, but I think this whole series lost momentum and vitality. And the deeper this series got into the story of a remnant population barely clinging on after a genocide several decades ago, well. She says they aren’t supposed to be space Jews, but, like, girl. These books are doing that thing where they valorize an oppressed population and an oppressed culture in a way that is both satisfying and also uncomfortable, if you get me. Satisfying in the way a reductive viewpoint is satisfying. Uncomfortable in the way a reductive viewpoint is uncomfortable.
Also, I am not at all qualified to opine on this, but I’ve caught the edges of conversations from people who think she has valorized her space Jews right over the border into weird antisemitic trope land, which did jump out at me when ( spoilers for the end of the first book ). Anyway, do with that what you will.
Look, I’m complaining about this a lot, but I genuinely think the first book is doing cool stuff, and I genuinely think the whole series is thinking about identity and refugees and cultural violence and retribution and repair. All chewy, important stuff. Also, the way women and nonbinary people are allowed to be intense and obsessed with each other and over-the-top in the first book is the good shit. I’m glad I read it, even though the last book had serious POV bloat (way too many) and didn’t land with the force I wanted it to.
Content notes: Torture, violence, discussions of genocide, child loss.
Of the many pre-Christmas stressful things this year, an unexpected one is ficinabox. And I didn't even participate this year! But I usually try to read and comment widely before creator reveals and this year the timing was not great for me.
I did find many fanworks to enjoy and loved many of them, and here are some of my favorites. Several of them can be enjoyed fandom-blind.
This Ao3 Author's Curse Has Got Hands by antimony_medusa Dream SMP, 5.6k, Phil & Techno, urban fantasy AU, A/N format Summary: Fanfic author Technoblade has been pre-writing and is excited to start posting his whumptober longfic, his trusty beta Philza at his side. Unfortunately for his posting schedule, the Ao3 author's curse hits him hard, fast, and with an intensity never before seen. Really it's starting to seem like he's cursed. Does this mean that he gives up posting his fic? Nah nah nah nah nah he's got this handled. Don't even worry about it. Chapters will be posted come hell, high water, hospital visit, house invasions, eviction, mob action, emergency road trip, or kidnapping. Technoblade never dies, and he never misses an update. Why I love it: A story told entirely in author's notes: the format works fantastic, the character voice is impeccable, and most importantly it's hilarious. Canon knowledge required: Definitely not (tested on my gf.)
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NB I'm not entirely sure Mr Child is up to date with what is currently on school syllabi and in school libraries, in particular on the basis of that Carol Atherton book, Reading Lessons I was reading recently....(on which I commented, 'how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....'
Does he really think schoolkids get plonked down with David Copperfield in their tiny hands at an early age?
(I think I was, what, 13 and in the top stream at a grammar school when we first got it, and that was back in the Upper Neolithic when we had to read it chiselled on granite slabs. I suspect things have moved on since then.)
And my dr rdrz know me and that I am all for reading should be pleasurable and people should read what they like and children's reading should not be gatekept - hat-tip here to Mr Fischer at my primary school who was all 'Comics are not the devil, comics can be a good thing' which was pretty progressive for 1950 something.
But maybe I'm most in particular raising my eyebrows when A Particular Genre is being touted, and moreover, one that is, shall we say, bloke-coded?
I think he's making a lot of assumptions there about what kids will read and want to read, but what do I know, I was hyper-lexical from an early age.
1. Dear Eric: I (64) have a sibling from whom I distance myself, but he (77) keeps poking the bear. We have never been close, and I have no desire to tolerate his insults.
He always had digs, nasty comments, insults. I would walk away and avoid him until he left. As years went by, I avoided him, but our mom would always insist on a family dinner. Now he was good at saving face, no comments when mom or other family members were around but the moment we were stuck in the same room, insults flew.
I was a constant support for my mom until she passed. I figured I was done with him, too. Well now he’s trying to reach out to me. I have responded with “not gonna happen” and I wrote out all the grievances with details. Now he's been whining to my other brother (70) that I'm mean to him and does not understand why I hate him. Brother #2 had no idea this was happening in my life. I explained to #2 and gave a few excerpts, ones that really hurt. How can I get past this?
2. Dear Eric: Twenty years ago, my husband’s brother and his wife let us know they were going no contact with us. They said it was permanent. When we asked the reasons, we heard we are insensitive and had hurt their feelings beyond repair.
They stopped contact between us and their 3-year-old son and their baby at that time. They said contact with us would damage their children. Attempts to apologize to them for offenses we barely understand didn’t work.
Five years ago, at a family wedding, my brother-in-law spoke with my husband but snubbed me to my face. He wouldn’t even say hello. Now another family wedding is scheduled next year. I have developed close relationships with others in the extended family but dread dealing with these relatives again. I’m thinking of simply saying hello if I see them and letting it go at that. Any advice will be taken to heart, I am struggling and it’s a year away.
3. Dear Eric: My son is turning 40 on December 22. My husband and I are at a quandary as to how to celebrate him.
There have been issues between my husband and him over things from his childhood. We did a special trip for his older brother when he turned 40 and would like to do something special for this son's 40th as well.
Our daughter-in-law has made special plans for him and we are not included. I understand that, but I need some ideas as to how to celebrate this extra special year without rocking the boat.
I love my son with all my heart, as I do all my children, and want his 40th birthday to be memorable in a positive way. Any suggestions?
4. Dear Eric: I've just turned 40 this past year. The last 15 years I was in a horrible drug addiction. I lied and hurt and did terrible things to a lot of people, especially my family.
About eight years ago they officially disowned me. Understandable.
I've cleaned up and got my act together six years ago. At first, I tried to force my way back into their lives, which all refuted. I lashed out, said horrible things and stopped trying to be in their lives. My mom will stop by on my birthday for 10 minutes or so and drop a card off at Christmas. As for my two older brothers and my father, it’s radio silence.
I guess what I'm asking is, what do I do to fix this and fast, as I said I've turned 40 this year, my parents are both 70. Time is running out, and I couldn't imagine living my life without some kind of acceptance from my father. Or knowing he did or does love me.
My heart breaks at the thought, but this is a real pickle. How can I fix a problem when the ones I need to fix it with won't talk to me? Do I just keep ignoring their existence and put on this façade that I don’t care to my wife and 4-year-old son? What picture am I painting to my son, as he's been guilty by association you could say as he has never spent time with his grandparents or uncles or even my nieces and nephews?
5. Dear Annie: Almost 15 years ago, my older sister removed me from her life after a series of messy arguments. At the time, she just stopped taking my calls and waited for me to leave family functions before going. She told our three siblings and mother that she didn't want me in her life. She likely gave them reasons but never allowed anyone to tell me.
When she ghosted me, I was heartbroken. I bugged everyone for years, asking how she was, crying about how much I missed her. I made many attempts to reconnect that were met with silence or warnings from family that she was still angry at me, but no one could ever say for what.
A few times, she asked our oldest sister to bring my kids for her to see them without me or my husband. My husband refused because he has never met her. I agreed with him.
Recently, I came to the conclusion that my sister removing me from her life was a blessing. She was toxic, and our relationship is a long history of cruelty on her part and a lack of boundaries mixed with codependency on mine. I told our oldest sister just that.
Mere days after that conversation with my oldest sister, my estranged sister messaged my teenage children on social media. She told them she was their aunt and that just because she and I don't get along doesn't mean she shouldn't have a relationship with them.
I responded by telling her she made the choice 15 years ago that we aren't family, that it was a blessing and she needs to leave my kids alone. Then I blocked her on their accounts.
She responded by sending my husband -- who she's never met or spoken to -- a message for me and then blocking him. Her argument was that I had played the victim for 15 years, that I was hateful and didn't support her. She said that I was using my kids as leverage. She called me toxic and stated that she was disappointed I didn't make any efforts to know her kids. She also stated repeatedly that I had been talking badly about her to everyone during the last 15 years.
I am very confused at this point. I don't know what she's been told for 15 years about what I've said because no one has told me anything. If I am toxic, why would she want me to have a relationship with her kids?
I believe I'm doing the right thing by keeping my teenagers away from her because I know how she treated me throughout our childhood and young adult years. She is not a safe person.
My siblings, their spouses and kids all seem to love her and have great relationships with her. It feels like most of the time, though, that if I don't reach out to them, I don't hear from them at all.
I'm now questioning if I should remove my three siblings from my life, too, as it sounds like they have been telling her I'm saying things. They've also been completely complacent in her alienation of me. -- Confused in Kansas
My grandmother passed yesterday morning. She's the last remaining of my grandparents. While dementia did claim all of her a year past, I guess it still hit me. I'll probably be a bit less responsive on here for a while.
Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).
Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".
I woke up antsy, which after a couple of hours morphed into a fuzzy, overwhelming anger I could barely repress despite having no specific target for or place to direct it, or really any useful action to take from it.
So that made me think about Dabi/Hawks, and want to write them, and to push hard on the angst, maybe post-canon, probably ending in MCD for at least one of them. Possibly both.
Then I remembered the sheep farming AU. Which I started in early, pre-vaccine covid days. In which Dabi and Hawks run away from it all and just live quietly, happily together, raising their sheep.
Maybe soft could be good, too. Time for a new entry in that AU! Also good for relearning to occasionally write short and to yeet more easily. Writing more short things can only work if I don't just add them to the towering pile of "stuff to edit at some point"!!! We'll prescribe you a sheep | Dabi/Hawks | 800 words | rated T
Summary: Dabi's sick and misses the sheep. Hawks tries to help.
Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the "Alexander Romance." Like Arthuriana, this is less a text than a genre, an assortment of tales about how Alexander quested for the Water of Life, slew a dragon, journeyed to the bottom of the ocean, and so forth.
Yes, that Alexander. The Great.
How the heck did we wind up with an entire genre of stories about a Macedonian conquerer who died young that bear so little resemblance to the historical reality?
The answer is that history is much easier to forget than we think nowadays, with our easily mass-produced books. However much you want to lament "those who do not remember the past" etc., we know vastly more about it than any prior age could even aspire to. The legendary tales about Alexander arose quite soon after his death, but by the medieval period, his actual life was largely forgotten; more factual texts were not rediscovered and disseminated until the Renaissance. So for quite a while there, the legends were basically all we had.
Historians tend to not like the phrase "the Dark Ages" anymore, and for good reason. It creates assumptions about what life was like -- nasty, brutish, and short -- that turn out to not really match the reality. But while plenty of people have indeed used that term to contrast with the "light" brought by the Renaissance, one of the men responsible for popularizing it (Cardinal Cesare Baronio, in the sixteenth century) meant it as a statement on the lack of records: to him, the Middle Ages were "dark" because we could not see into them. The massive drop in surviving records had cast that era into shadow.
How do those records get lost? Year Two went into the perils that different writing materials and formats are vulnerable to; those in turn affect the preservation of historical knowledge. Papyrus texts have to be recopied regularly if they're to survive in most environments, so anything that disrupts the supply of materials or the labor available to do that recopying means that dozens, hundreds, even thousands of texts will just . . . go away. Parchment is vastly more durable, but it's also very expensive, and so it tended to get recycled: scrape off the existing text, write on it again, and unless you were lazy enough in your scraping that the old words can still be read -- think of a poorly erased blackboard or whiteboard -- later people will need chemical assistance (very destructive) or high-tech photography to see what you got rid of.
And when your supply of written texts shrinks, it tends to go hand in hand with the literacy rate dropping. So even if you have a record of some historical event, how many people have read it? Just because a thing gets preserved doesn't mean the information it contains will be widely disseminated. That is likely to be the domain of specialists -- if them! Maybe it just sits on a shelf or in a box, completely untouched.
Mind you, written records are not the only way of remembering the past. Oral accounts can be astonishingly precise, even over a period of hundreds or thousands of years! But that tends to be true mostly in societies that are wholly oral, without any tradition of books. On an individual level, we have abundant research showing that parts of the brain which don't see intensive use tend to atrophy; if you don't exercise your memory on a daily basis, you will have a poorer memory than someone who lives without writing, let alone a smartphone. On a societal level, you need training and support for the lorekeepers, so they act as a verification check on each other's accurate recitation. Without that, the stories will drift over time, much like the Alexander Romance has done.
And regardless of whether history is preserved orally or on the page, cultural factors are going to shape what history gets preserved. When the fall of the Western Roman Empire changed the landscape of European letters, the Church was left as the main champion of written records. Were they going to invest their limited time and resources into salvaging the personal letters of ordinary Greeks and Romans? Definitely not. Some plays and other literary works got recopied; others were lost forever. The same was true of histories and works of philosophy. A thousand judgment calls got made, and anything which supported the needs and values of the society of the time was more likely to make the cut, while anything deemed wrong-headed or shocking was more likely to fall by the wayside.
The result is that before the advent of the printing press -- and even for some time after it -- the average person would be astoundingly ignorant of any history outside living memory. They might know some names or events, but can they accurately link those up with dates? Their knowledge would be equivalent to my understanding of the American Civil War amounting to "there was a Great Rebellion in the days of Good President Abe, who was most treacherously murdered by . . . I dunno, somebody."
In fact, there might be several different "somebodies" depending on who's telling the tale. John Wilkes Booth might live on as a byword for an assassin -- imagine if "booth" became the general term for a murderer -- but it's equally possible that some people would tell a tale where Lincoln was murdered by an actor, others where a soldier was responsible, and did that happen at a theatre or at his house? (Booth originally planned to kidnap Lincoln from the latter; that detail might get interpolated into the memory of the assassination.) Or it gets mixed up somehow with Gettysburg, and Lincoln is shot right after giving his famous speech, because all the famous bits have been collapsed together.
Even today, there are plenty of Americans who would probably be hard-pressed to correctly name the start and end dates of our Civil War; I'm not trying to claim that the availability of historical information means we all know it in accurate detail. But at least the information is there, and characters who need to know it can find it. Furthermore, our knowledge is expanding all the time, thanks to archaeology and the recovery of forgotten or erased documents. Now and in the future, the challenge tends to lie more in the ability to sift through a mountain of data to find what you need, and in the arguments over how that data should be interpreted.
But in any story modeled on an earlier kind of society, I roll my eyes when characters are easily able to learn what happened six hundred years ago, and moreover the story they get is one hundred percent correct. That just ain't how it goes. The past is dark, and when you shine a light into its depths, you might get twelve different reflections bouncing back at you, as competing narratives each remember those events in variable ways.
For a writer, though, I don't think that's a bug. It's a feature. Let your characters struggle with this challenge! Muddy the waters with contradictory accounts! If you want your readers to know the "real" story, write that as a bonus for your website or a standalone piece of related fiction. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
I stumbled across this well-spell-crafted game whilst wondering around itch.io: The Daily Spell, a story about a sudden surge in magical beast manifestations in a fantasy city, told through daily word puzzles that resolve into the headlines of brief newspaper articles that advance the story. Quite delightful and very well done.
1. I had a meeting scheduled at 2pm today and then one at 4pm, and was expecting to have to stay at work until after the second meeting was over, but we moved the earlier one up a bit and were done by like 2:15, so I decided to go home and take the second meeting from there. Traffic is a bit better at that time, plus it meant once the meeting was over I was already home and could just get on with my evening, so that was nice.
2. This cutie guy snuggled with me while I had my meeting this afternoon. :)
Surprising but welcome news – a green light is lit for a Second Anime Season of Yona of the Dawn – more than 10 years after the first season. The manga is just now ending and will hit 47 volumes. I can’t say I’m really excited about the anime; I’m currently more interested in how the story ends.
Speaking of story ends... after ignoring the series all season, yesterday I binge-watched the last 10 episodes of My Hero Academia. The long series ended about as I expected. Except for Ochaco getting shortchanged (as she has throughout the series), I’m satisfied but not delighted with the ending. I don’t think I need to watch this series again.
If you should ever want to wind up an old-school Robert Heinlein fan — which, by the way, you shouldn’t do, they’re all clocking seventy-plus years now, and you should respect your elders — tell them you enjoy the movie version of Starship Troopers more than the Heinlein novel on which it was (somewhat loosely) based. Then move fast, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get whacked upside the head with a cane. Those OG Heinlein fans may be older now, but they’re spry, and if there is one heresy remaining for them, a preference for the film over the novel would be it.
And in many respects they are not wrong. The movie version of Starship Troopers wasn’t originally based (directly) on the novel; screenwriter Ed Neumeier wrote up a sci-fi action movie treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 that did not reference the novel at all. It was only later in the development process that Neumeier and producer Jon Davidson learned the rights to the novel were available and optioned them, and started grafting elements of Heinlein’s tale onto the spine of Outpost 7. Add in director Paul Verhoeven, who legend has it couldn’t even get through the novel but knew he wanted to satirize fascism in the film, and you end up a final cinematic product that is to Heinlein’s novel like grape soda is to an actual grape.
As it turns out, however, a lot of people like the taste of grape soda. I happen to be one of them.
Nor do I think it’s a particular heresy to enjoy the movie, even if one prefers the novel. Very few movies adapted from novels are scrupulously faithful to their source material, and the few that are, are usually weirdly paced and unwieldly (looking at you, Watchmen, and even that changed the ending). The things that make for a great novel are not often the things that make for a great cinematic experience, and vice-versa, as some of the greatest films in history are made from mediocre books (looking at you, The Godfather).
Whenever I mention to people that my novel Old Man’s War is under option, there’s someone who inevitably tells me, I hope they keep it true to the novel. I can assure you they probably will not. As just one example, at one point Chris Hemsworth was attached to star in the movie. Do you think they would pay Hemsworth $20 million (or whatever) to be in the movie, and then paint him green, to match the description of his character in the novel? I do not. Nor do I think a star on the level of Hemsworth would have wanted to be that color. It’s not easy being green, by which I mean that he (and many many other characters) would have to spend hours in makeup every morning. They’d save time and money letting him be his original hue.
I was a movie critic for years and now for years I’ve been having works optioned for film and television. So I am here to tell you, with some authority: Movies always deviate from the novels. The question is less, why aren’t they being faithful to the source material. The question: Is what they’re doing to the source material interesting?That’s the question I ask when I watch a movie based on a novel.
What Paul Verhoeven is doing inStarship Troopers is very interesting. No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a mediation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?
The story at least initially follows the novel’s outline: Johnny Rico (the impossibly square-jawed Casper Van Dien) is a callow, rich pretty boy who is not too smart, but is also vaguely dissatisfied with the cushy life being laid out for him. So when his pals Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) sign up for Federal Service to fight against a bug-like alien race called the Arachnids, he sort of goes along, too, annoying his parents in the process. Boot camp is hard for Johnny, and he almost calls it quits, but then his home town of Buenos Aires gets smooshed by an Arachnid-guided meteorite, and then, well, it is on.
Nearly everything up to this point in the film, save for a brief intro battle sequence, has the flat and brightly-lit affect of 90s teen television: it all looks like Starship Troopers 90210, up to and including absolutely beautiful “teenagers” who are clearly well into their 20s, if not older (of the main trio Van Dien was 27 when filming started, Richards was 24 and Harris was the baby at 22). And this is the point: Verhoeven wants to seduce you with hot kids in a nice clean world that seems great as long as you ignore the public executions, the denial of voting status for most people, the military dictatorship, and, you know, the war out there in space.
But then you get to that war out in space, and you know what happens to all those really hot kids? Nothing good! And that’s where Verhoeven springs his trap. All the physical beauty in the world won’t save you in battle! All those really cool, vaguely-nazi-looking uniforms don’t look nearly as good shredded and covered in blood! And all the training and/or indoctrination you might get means nothing when the military command tells you little and sends you to die by the shipload. Verhoeven, who has never been shy about gouts of blood, severed limbs and gore, paints his masterpiece here in the viscera of the young, who ten seconds before looked like they should be in a Gap ad. The director holds up the fascistic perfection of a Leni Riefenstahl film, specifically to gleefully dash, slash, and splash it into the dirt.
Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, because this is the US and we don’t do irony especially well), lots of folks didn’t clue into what Verhoeven was up to, accusing the famously anti-fascist director of glorifying Nazism, an accusation which Verhoeven was flabbergasted by. It would take years, long after the movie was out of the theaters and into home video, for most people to fully get what he was up to. Some people still don’t like it; many old school Heinlein fans continue to be enraged that Verhoeven’s lardering his story with fascistic imagery painted their favorite writer with the authoritarian brush.
I don’t think Heinlein ever landed on the “fascist” square at any point in his life. It’s certainly true, however, that Heinlein was moving target, politics-wise; how else can you describe someone who worked on the campaigns of both Upton Sinclair, a socialist and Democrat (who ran for governor of California in the 1930s) and the uberconservative Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964? Heinlein’s politics started left and sauntered right and added in a dollop of free-love weirdness (to, uhhhhh, say the least) in there to confuse everybody. The dynamic range of his politics over his life (and how that leaked into his fiction) means that if one wants to, one can cobble together an image of him through his work that these days gives off an authoritarian odor. Starship Troopers, the novel, is the prime source for that. The blatantly fascist imagery of the movie, satire or not, doesn’t help his fans make an argument against that.
I’ve gone into the weeds with the politics of Starship Troopers, so let me note that aside from the design of the movie, it’s also a sharply-paced action film, where the bug-killin’s both varied and plentiful: if you’re looking to see a bunch of alien bugs get ripped up by humans as much as the humans get ripped up by the aliens, this is your film. The CGI in film remains immaculate; thirty years on, it’s wild how good and how threatening the arachnids look. This film doesn’t have just one or two of them, sneaking about ala the Alien films; no, it piles them on in the hundreds, and they very much look like they are going to fuck everyone up. As Carl points out, “It’s a numbers game. They have more.” Boy, do they ever. There are very few scenes in the film where it ever feels like the humans have the upper hand, and even when they do, they’re as likely to lose a few fingers than not. Whatever else this movie is, it’s a good action-adventure film, if not, exactly, a feel-good action-adventure film.
Like so many other Paul Verhoeven films, Starship Troopers is a chaotic mess of tones; all those action scenes and pointed imagery and pretty, pretty people, tossed into a stylistic blender and sent a-whirlin’ at the highest speed setting. Almost thirty years ago now I wrote a review of this film that started with “Paul Verhoeven is a director who can give you everything you want in a movie, as long as you want too much of it.” You know what? I stand behind that sentence. Verhoeven thinks subtlety is for cowards, and he’s having none of it here, and you’re not getting of it, either. You either accept this is going to be a firehose of a movie, or you get out of the way.
To get back to those old school Heinlein fans, many of whom I like very much as humans, I can only offer the following advice to them, in terms of how to think about their beloved book, and this heretical film Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good. You can’t copyright titles, you know. It was inevitable there would be a movie and novel with the same name, otherwise having little to do with each other. These things happen. And that’s okay.
Also, wait until I tell you about the remarkable coincidence that happened with I, Robot.
Posting from my phone because the wind blew the Internet out 🙃
Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!
Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
I am officially on vacation - I don't have to go back to work until January 5th! Now the bakepocalypse can begin! I've made more work for myself, but I think it will all work out - I've been planning it in my head, and this is how it goes (please take "run dishwasher" as a given at least once and probably twice each day):
I think adding in the roast pork and the pork buns and the orange cranberry rolls might be kind of nuts? But also having that food on hand will let me eat breakfast/dinner without having to do any real cooking or ordering in. (I will also have some ham and cheese to make sandwiches if it comes to that, and some granola bars for snacks/breakfast if the orange cranberry rolls don't happen.) And I think I do have time before the cupcake baking begins in earnest.
What I'm considering now is whether I should make the frostings and immediately put them in piping bags (with specific tips in) for storing in the fridge instead of trying to do the transfers all at once on Christmas Eve morning the way I usually do. Filling the bags and then keeping them in tupperware might be easier? But I've also found that sometimes my "time-saving" plans end up making things worse, so idk.
Anyway, that's my plan for the next 6 or so days! It's a good thing I enjoy cooking. *g*
No, internet, I guarantee you that 100% of the time that someone searches for explain pain supercharged, results they do not want are anything you think matches the string "explain paint supercharged". Hope that helps! Have A Nice Day!
(Still not anything like as annoying as fuzzy matching on a[b|d]sorb in GOOGLE SCHOLAR, but nonetheless Quite.)
RILEY: What's your plan?
BUFFY: Big sleep. My count encounter wiped me out.
RILEY: (nods) I'm kinda wired. Maybe I should just let you get your rest.
BUFFY: You sure? I mean, maybe if you just lie down with me... (suggestive look)
RILEY: (grinning) Nothing you are about to say will lead to rest.
This morning I mused that today is in that liminal space where I cannot yet eat the cheese we bought for Christmas but there are mince pies on the countertop and I could have one for breakfast.
I did have one for breakfast. (With a slice of regular cheese because mince pies are too sweet for me on their own and taste really good with strong cheese.)
D and I are off to family Christmas celebrations tomorrow, so I signed off work this afternoon for the last time until 2026!
In the three previous years I've had a white collar job, I've never taken this long off, I've always worked a little between Christmas and new year. I kinda like it for catching up on stuff when work is quiet and people leave me alone, and long stretches of unstructured time isn't good for my mental health.
But this time, I'm so ready for this. This year has been so long.
(I know myself well enough to expect that I'll be horrified on the 27th of December when I have a whole week ahead of me with nothing to do. But I can worry about that when I get to it.)
I'm a little sad to be missing queer club's Christmas party this evening, but my carefully planned after-work itinerary fell apart almost as soon as I made it, when my friend L texted and asked if I could come over because he and his husband (also my friend) were having a bad mental health time thanks to the DWP (they are both disabled).
I almost literally dropped everything and left the house, because L isn't the kind of person who gets in touch spontaneously, has the energy for social stuff, or can ask for help easily, so for him to do all these things felt like a big deal to me.
It felt kinda weird to leave in what felt like an emergency and arrive only able to offer hugs and silly, distracting conversation. But I'm assured that it did help. And I'm glad I could do it, I like them so much. It was a good use of my social spoons for the evening.
Do you have a Doctor Who community or a journal that we are not currently linking to? Leave a note in the comments and we'll add you to the watchlist (doctor_watch).
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For whatever reason, I was super sure I'd already posted this. IDEK.
Re-reads. HUH
None. I'd planned to reread a couple of things before the year ended. Unfortch, that doesn't seem likely. *pouts*
I DNF'd
* A King's Mage by S.E. McPhearson (Book 1 of Heart-Mage Trilogy, Fantasy polyamore romance) - Beau, the spare prince, becomes the heir. He's also got to marry Penny (his dead brother's fiance who hates his guts) despite him being in love with Elias,his personal bodyguard.
DNF'd at the beginning of Chapter 4
The writing is fine?
Sadly, the more I read, the less interested I became abt the story. If the setting up isn't enough to get me hooked. . .
Also, the worldbuilding was a total fail. Yes, this is a book in a fantasy setting, but the overall vibe gives "inspired by French monarchy" and that's abt it! Most characters' names were French or French-sounding. And yet, the dialogue was v. modern. But there was (as far as I could tell) no electricity, cars, etc.
Picked up this book in hopes that I'd get lost into a whole new adventure. Again, I didn't connect with the story and found most of its worldbuilding v. confusing. Given that I have a lot of other books to read, I gave up on this one w/o any regrets. Which is sad cuz I was eager to read abt the M/M/F-as-endgame ship. Alas. I gave it a 1 out of 5.
Had an awesome time at first (but it all went downhill from there).
* That Weekend by Kara Thomas (YA Mystery) - Claire wakes up in the middle of a forest with no idea of how she got there or what happened during the previous 2 days. Also, even though she tries hard, she's got no idea where's Kat, her BFF, or Jesse (Kat's boyfriend) . . .
I'd read two of this author's other YAs a whole decade or so ago and distinctly remember liking them. For whatever reason, I decided to check this one out too. This author has a v. clean writing style--which is something that's quite important in mysteries. Even more so in this instance since the narrator is totally unreliable due to amnesia. At no point did I get lost or confused as to what was happening. 👍🏾 for that.
Additionally, this author has a flair for writing teenage characters that read like actual ppl. They've got insecurities, desires, good parts and bad ones too. Their interior lives are rich. This enhanced the plot in the best way.
As for the mystery, I REALLY enjoyed certain aspects of it. Especifically the reveal as to WHAT HAPPENED and, even more, WHY did the events happened. The motivations everyone had within themselves and how those desires (etc) kept the plot moving for the most part.
In a way, I'd say the keyword for this book is MOTIVATION. Sometimes, the characters' agendas ran parallel, oftentimes they ran against each other. And it was v. exciting to see everything being played out. Sometimes even within the same chapter.
Re the mystery: I did 🙄 at the explanation of HOW the events happened. It crossed the line into unbelievable. HOWEVAH, I shrugged it off despite how ridic it all was.
Claire . . . *sighs* OTOH, I think she was a good protagonist cuz her amnesia helped her become a conduit into the story. OTOH, once she got home, the pacing really slowed down and became repetitive with Claire self-medicating AND spiraling every waking moment AND being extremely selfish yet she was also traumatized.
MY problem was that she's someone who had severe anxiety. So, watching her being on the verge of an anxiety attack 24/7 while being unable to look away (due to her being the sole POV character + the fact that the story was told in 1st person) made this part of the book a deeply unpleasant reading experience. From time to time, I had to put the book to the side for 10 mins or so cuz it was exhausting and suffocating.
There were things that happen in the last two chapters that got me wondering what "inspired" the author to include a v. specific thing TWO CHAPTERS AWAY FROM THE ENDING. This meant that the book didn't land the ending but fully crashed it nose-first.
MEGA SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING AHEAD: It turns out that Kat and Jessy are HALF-SIBLINGS BY BLOOD--which HUHHHH?
NGL, I didn't like the incest twist and how its repercussions (once OTHER CHARACTERS figured it out) were handled. I'm confused why Marian (Kat's own grandmother) wasn't clearer with Kat as to why she was so opposed abt Kat and Jesse's relationship, frex.
AND THEN, finding out that Jesse had known all along and didn't care made everything TEN TIMES GROSSER. My best guess is that the author wanted to add a major flaw to Jesse as a character since, aside from kinda leading Claire on a little, he hadn't done/said anything bad. And then, it's like "boom, yeah, we're half-siblings and I CHOSE TO NOT TELL YOU, but it's cool cuz we love each other." Me: 🤮🤮🤮🤮"
Averaging how I'd liked at least half of the book vs. that mess of an ending, I gave it a 3 out of 5..
* The Wife Deserved It by Darby Kayne (Domestic thriller) - Reid is over his marriage and, after much planning, he's decided tonight's the night his wife will die. But, the one thing that Reid has never considered is that his wife is READY for him. . .
The first half of the novella is tight. Excellent timing. I didn't mind how the story pushed and pulled me while the sense of utter dread abt the goings on kept building up. Good worldbuilding too. For a story with multiple POVs, everyone sounded like real people who had great and terrible motivations.
The keyword for this story was confrontation. Both in the sense of characters facing each other as well as facing (or not, in some cases) the truth as to who they really are.
OTOH, The story plateaued in the second half. I can't explain why w/o going into FULL SPOILERS: One of the POVs was Anna's (the wife). Somewhere near the beginning of the novella, she gets a full chapter where it's extremely clear she's made her choice. She will kill Reid as that's the only way out (and also cuz he's decided to kill her cuz he's a jackass.) The chapter includes a moment where Anna sees Reid searching for her and he's holding a knife.
Things get complicated and plans go awry..
THEN, starting around Chapter 15 and going on until Chapter 25, the story spends several POV chapters from Reid and Paige's POVs. With BOTH trying to convince Anna to get on their respective sides.
NGL, this was v. tiresome to read. ANNA HAD ALREADY MADE HER CHOICE! So IDK why the author made Anna appear unsure/wavering chapter after chapter. If anything, I'd have preferred that the author had made Anna's choice at the beginning of the novella uncertain. Because THAT would've kept up the suspense.
Instead, I spent those 11 (thankfully short) chapters mentally tapping my watch so Anna and Paige could help Reid shuffle off his mortal coil. But the author had already made her choice and so I just had to keep waiting.
In the end, I liked it enough to give it a 3.3 out of 5 and will deffo read more of her books. 😛
It was . . . fine?
* Sweep of the Heart by Ilona Andrews (Book 5 of the Innkeeper Chronicles) (Urban Fantasy Romance) - Dina and Sean are chosen to host the space version of The Bachelor for one of the most powerful rules in the entire universe. There's additional drama via the disappearance of Sean's mentor. Oh, and the Costo lady returns . . .
There was worldbuilding (and how!) and plot (ditto) as expected from an IA book. I also gotta give 👍🏾 to having a character who is Black AND openly queer. Also how the latter was reflected on the selection of the contestants (with female and male hopefuls) without any of it being any kind of big deal. Oh, and the plottier developments toward the end were hella yummy too.
The key word for this novel was EXCESS.
NGL, my brain sorta @ ____ @ many, many times over the multiple descriptions of each setting: from the individual teams' rooms to the locations where each trial and date took place. Although I do appreciate that, like the rest of IA's novels I've read, this one doesn't have White Room Syndrome, this time IA really went OTT in terms of creating a picture in their readers' minds. Quasi infinite accounts of what every nook and cranny looked like.
This was also reflected in the tons of accounts as to what everyone wore. Something that was underlined by the size of the cast.
Off the top of my head, this novel had around 40 or so MAIN CHARACTERS. NGL, there were moments where I lost track as to who was from which group/planet. Why couldn't IA had started with 6 hopefuls for the contest vs. 12? :|
There was also Too Much focus on the Bachelor plot, IMO. It ran for over 70% of the novel. Hell, I even FORGOT that the A Plot was abt rescuing Sean's mentor. AND THEN, when the story finally got back to that, the actual!rescue was gently pushed to the side.
And this is where the push-and-pull feelings I've got abt this novel rear their head cuz the last 2 chapters drop so many things that had me going WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA??? and OMAIGOOOOOO!! IF ONLY THE BOOK HAD CUT SOME OF THE BACHELOR-ESQUE SCENES IN EXCHANGE FOR MORE OF THE MAIN/A PLOT!!!! *Pouts*
FINALLY, I know this novel was initially published in serialized form over at IA's site.
What I don't understand (and irritated the fuck out of me) was the inclusion of summaries (of what had happened in the previous chapter) whenever there was a new chapter. Not only was it REALLY UNNECESSARY, but the jokey/hyuk hyuk tone was unpleasant EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated the summaries. IA mentioned at the start of the book that they left them in the book cuz they'd been so well received when the story was posted on their site. I'm sure it worked when the chapters were released once a week. But seeing them in sequence was OBNOXIOUS AND REPETITIVE.
The other extras (2 round of descriptions of the contestants) were USELESS AND REDUNDANT. But, at least, those extras were at the end of the book and not interwoven into the story in an unavoidable way like the stupid-ass summaries were. (Yes, I hated them THAT MUCH.)
The book DOES END ON A SOFT CLIFFHANGER. And, per the little I know, it'll be a while before IA gets working on the next story. Such is life. I'll happily dive in whenever Book 6 drops, that's for sure.
In the end, this isn't my fave entry of the series but, at the same time, I can't deny I had a good time reading it, LOL. I gave it a 3.2 out of 5.
Good vibes all around
* Sweep with Me by Ilona Andrews Book 4.5 of the Innkeeper Chronicles (Urban Fantasy Romance) - Dina and Sean are ready to celebrate the holidays Innkeeper-style. They're hoping none of the guests end up killing each other . . .
Such a DELIGHTFUL NOVELLA!!! There are some neat surprises within the pages of this book. I also love how the A plot (Dina and Sean trying to host some ~interesting folks without having anyone kill each other) and the B plot (Dina processing the events in the previous book and how it affected her own magic) intertwined.
I was, once again, dissatisfied with how few scenes abt Dina/Sean's romance were included. *Pouts*
Also, I did get the sense that IA overstuffed the plot by a smidgen. I could almost tell a point where IA nearly lost control of the goings on. Thankfully, things got back on track and the story landed in the best way possible. I gave it a 4 out of 5.
Current fic tally
Have picked up 217 fics, DNF'd 101. Things are fine!
Some thoughts
Had an uneven reading experience. Going thru the rest of the published entries for the Innkeeper Chronicles was fun even with the stumbles here and there. The two mysteries were solid enough for me to not DNF'ing them. Bonus: I'm deffo OJO abt Darby Kane's other novels. Sadly, the M/M/F was a big fail. Alas.
Up next
Last time: I've got the last two published books for the Innkeeper Chronicles, an M/M/F fantasy romance, and I'm reading the first book in a female detective series. Dunno why, but my yays for reading horror have sort of gone to ground? I might end up reading something scary next month, IDK. 😅
I paused the female detective novel cuz I'd planned to do a quick Non-fiction November reading thing. But that stalled HARD.
My current reads include two biographies from separate queer ppl, the fist book in a female detective series, a book abt #MeToo, another Darby Kane novel, and mayyybe a kinky F/M romance.
Fandom and Art Stuff elasticella: sapphic stocking stuffers. Lots of great prompts! Open for fills until 31 December, or they're all full, whichever happens last.
Street Art Utopia: The Giant Kitten. By Oriol Arumi at Torrefarrera Street Art Festival in Torrefarrera, Cataluna, Spain
Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack. I read this, and was like "hmmmmmmm." Because it seemed plausible that there were bots or whatever, but also a lot of people I'd seen critiquing the album were definitely humans that I knew. But also human conversation can be driven by bots without the humans realising it. And also, I don't care enough about TS to look into the whole mess. Then I saw the following.
Trans Rights Are Human Rights The Walrus: Kids Deserve a New Gender Paradigm by Kai Cheng Thom. Lovely, thoughtful look at how we see gender, and maybe kids have this more figured out than a lot of adults to. Older piece, but I enjoyed reading it again.
Canadian Politics Stuff The Tyee: Human Rights Tribunal on RCMP Methods Delays Decision Nearly a Year. This is some fucking bullshit. The elders are dying of old age before they're seeing any kind of justice. I am enjoying how Amanda Follett Hosgood is so out of fucks to give on the publication ban that she's basically putting up a bright red arrow pointing to A.B.'s name, even if she can't actually say it. Which is John Furlong, incidentally. And seriously, fuck that guy.
Times Colonist: Water-contaminated fuel caused crash of Port Hardy-bound plane: TSB. This is neither here nor there, really, but I find Transportation Safety Board investigations really interesting. Even if they take a really long time (i.e. I found this while looking for information about a more recent crash, but will probably have to wait a couple years to find out what happened to that guy).
Slightly Dated U.S.A. Politics Stuff Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American: December 6, 2025. Beautifully ties in the events of Pearl Harbor with the politics of today.
The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate and exclusion; it is forever being stitched into, as the site says, new patterns, new connections, new relationships. Solidarity is always about connection across difference, about the way you stand with someone you have something crucial in common with but who may be different in other ways. It is a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole. It is e pluribus unum.
Trust's £330k appeal to buy Cerne Giant's 'lair' - if anyone is unaware of the existence of the Cerne Giant, I should issue a NSFW warning for the images - 'the ancient naked figure sculpted into the chalk in Dorset' with a gigantic todger.
The trust said purchasing the land would allow the charity to restore and care for sections of chalk grassland, plant new woodland, and create habitats to support species under threat.
Well, we think there is some primeval fertility mojo all ready to support the threatened species, no?
The National Trust has looked after the Giant and the immediately surrounding sward since 1920. (I now want to poke about in the British Newspaper Archive to see what the reporting, if any, was like....)
Last year, 228 pups were born at Orford Ness in Suffolk, which is home to the county's first breeding colony of grey seals. The breeding season began in November and already hundreds have been born with still about a month to go. Matt Wilson, the trust's countryside manager, said the team believed the entire colony now consisted of more than 1,000 seals.
Existing data however is currently presented in wildly different formats across different databases, to varying degrees of detail and accuracy, and held on disparate websites managed by individuals. This means that the future of these resources collectively is highly insecure.
When I opened Instagram yesterday, the first video to come up was from one of my favorite food content creators, Justine Dorion (perhaps better known as @justine_snacks). You may remember back in 2022 when I made her Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. Well, this time, she was making Sticky Ginger Bars, and I knew immediately that I was going to make them right then and there.
Wouldn’t you know it, though, I was lacking heavy cream and dates! Funny enough, I usually have both, but just happened to be out in this instance. So I grabbed them at the store and then made these bars right then and there.
So let’s talk about it!
First, the ingredients. We’ve got the basics: flour, sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, the usual suspects. Some of the more “oh I don’t have that in my pantry currently” type items are pecans, dates, and fresh ginger. At least those are pretty easily acquirable! Overall, I thought the ingredients were very normal things, and not overly expensive. Dates are definitely pricey (and so is my one true butter, Kerrygold) but otherwise it seems like a pretty standard, easy list of ingredients.
The first thing I made was the ginger cookie dough. I loved that in the steps of her recipe, she lists the measurements for the ingredient you’re using in that step. IT WAS SO HELPFUL. Thank you, Justine, for thinking of those of us who are tired of scrolling back up to the ingredients list to see the measurement again. Bless.
Mixing everything for the dough together was super easy, I just threw everything in my stand mixer and let it go until it was lighter in color like the recipe says. The real struggle came in trying to press the dough into a parchment lined baking dish.
In Justine’s photo on her blog, the dough looks so much more cooperative and less anger-inducingly sticky. Here’s how mine looked after I about had a meltdown about not being able to spread it evenly and get it into the corners well:
The dough, though very spiced and tasty, was difficult to work with and didn’t want to spread nicely. It just wanted to stick to itself and the rubber spatula. But I finally got it in there well enough that I moved onto the caramel.
I don’t like making caramel, I find it to a trifling process. I will say for this caramel, it was about as easy as a caramel can be. Butter and sugar (and in this case, honey!) and you melt it together until it boils and then once you take it off the heat after a few minutes you just add your dates and pecans and heavy cream and there you go. Not so bad! It really took no time at all to make the caramel, the thing that took forever was chopping the dates. Partially because I bought pitted and had to pit each one before chopping them.
After mixing up the caramel, here’s what it looked like:
I burned myself very slightly eating more of this than would be considered just a taste test. It was so flippin’ good. Once I poured it on top of the cookie dough and put it in the oven, I licked that spatula spotless. Delish.
The recipe says to bake them for 25-30 minutes, so I just did 25 and hoped they weren’t underdone. It came out looking like this (I sprinkled flaky sea salt on before the photo):
Well, it’s certainly something. Mostly pecans, from the looks of it. It didn’t look all that glamorous, and I had to stop myself from being impatient and trying to cut into it while it was warm. It was pretty much straight goop. Not soupy, but definitely not solid, either. I was nervous I had messed up, or not baked it long enough. I started to get anxious that I’d wasted all that time and ingredients.
Turns out, it just needed to cool (like the recipe says)!
Okay that looks really yummy. And… it is! Molasses, pecans, vanilla, fresh ginger, what’s not to love? These bad boys are packed full of spicy goodness (not spicy like hot, spicy like warm Christmas-y spices) and they are sticky sweet ooey-gooey goodness that needs washed down with a swig of milk. They are a lot but they are quite delicious.
I will definitely be making these again for people for the holidays! It’s the perfect Christmas time treat.
Last but not least, I wanted to talk about how many dishes I used. I will start off by saying I definitely could’ve cut down on my dish total if I had thought things through a little better, but I’m the kind of person that will throw something in the sink and then think, “oh wait I still needed that.”
That being said, I used the stand mixer bowl and paddle attachment, two rubber spatulas, one baking pan, one pot for the caramel, a cutting board and knife for the dates and pecans, a grater for the fresh ginger, and several measuring cups and teaspoons. Not horrible, at least it’s all stuff that can go in the dishwasher (minus the knife).
Another thing I really love about this recipe is that Justine provides alternatives like just using more pecans if you don’t like dates, you can make it nut-free with toasted pumpkin seeds, and if you want to make it gluten free you can just use one to one gluten free flour (she has the same favorite brand of flour as I do, King Arthur). Whilst I was making these and adding the cinnamon, I thought that they would be good with cardamom in them, and she actually says you can add some to make it even more holiday-warmth-esque!
So, yeah, I like how she writes her recipes, and I like the result of making these. Thank you, Justine, for another great recipe! She’s actually one of the few food content creator’s cookbooks I have. I even preordered it.
How do you feel about these ginger bars? Do you like fresh ginger? Are you a fan of dates? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Disneyland is still way more crowded than I was anticipating. We got over to the parks around 6:30pm and were planning to get dinner from the Festival of Holidays carts at DCA and assumed it would be less crowded there than at Disneyland, but the lines to get in were really long for some reason. Once we were actually inside it wasn't too bad (still crowded, though), so I guess it was just a case of a lot of people arriving for after work trips at the same time.
1. Spent most of the work day cleaning up data and while I originally thought it was going to take me a couple days, I actually got the whole file done today, which was nice.
2. We went to Disneyland for dinner. Still way more crowded than I would have thought with so many passholders blocked out, but not quite as bad as last Monday. We did have some really delicious food, though. And we finally managed to get some more of those cranberry orange loaves from Jolly Holiday and brought them home for breakfast tomorrow.
3. Jasper's really loving the warming bed now that it has lost its sides and become a warming cushion. Not sure if it's because of the new shape or because it's on top of a chest rather than on the floor, but he's into it.
Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.
Over the last week...
Posted & commented on bnha_fans. Final episode of the anime aired. Main series is truly truly over now!!!
Everything I've previously read by M.T. Anderson emotionally devastated me, so I despite the fact that Nicked was billed as a comedy I went in bravely prepared to be emotionally devastated once again.
This did not happen .... although M.T. Anderson cannot stop himself from wielding a sharp knife on occasion, it it turns out the book is indeed mostly a comedy .....
Nicked is based on a Real Historical Medieval Heist: the city of Bari is plague-ridden, and due to various political pressures the City's powers have decided that the way to resolve this is to steal the bones of St. Nicholas from their home in Myra and bring them to Bari to heal the sick, revive the tourism trade, and generally boost the city's fortunes. The central figures on this quest are Nicephorus, a very nice young monk who had the dubious fortune of receiving a dream about St. Nicholas that might possibly serve as some sort of justification for this endeavor, and Tyun, a professional relic hunter (or con artist? Who Could Say) who is not at really very nice at all but is Very Charismatic And Sexy, which is A Problem for Nicephorus.
The two books that Nicked kept reminding me of, as I read it, were Pratchett's Small Gods and Tolmie's All the Horses of Iceland. Both of those books are slightly better books than this, but as both of them are indeed exceptionally good books I don't think it takes too much away from Nicked to say that it's not quite on their level: it's still really very fun! And, unlike in those other somewhat better books, the unlikely companions do indeed get to make out!
I did end it, unsurprisingly, desperately wanting to know more about the sources on which it was based to know what we do know about this Real Historical Medieval Heist, but it turns out they are mostly not translated into English. Foiled again!
Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.
And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.
Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.
That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.
You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.
Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.
What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.
But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.
(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)
It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.
By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.
Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.
It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.
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