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media: music

Slightly drunk music post \m/ \m/

I'm not going to tell you guys how many stouts down I am, because it's not actually very many but in my defence I'm on multiple different meds that you're not supposed to mix alcohol with. 🙃

First, a little Iron Maiden deep dive! The Final Frontier was released in 2010 and usually hovers somewhere near the bottom of everyone's list of ranked Iron Maiden albums. But the other weekend I decided to give it my full attention in a dedicated listen-through, and - man, this band has genuinely never actually released a bad album, have they? The Final Frontier doesn't grab you the way some of their more popular albums do, but it has substance in a way that only really comes out if you pay full attention (and is so, so worth the effort when it does). It's a cinematic, semi-themed collection of songs about adventure and danger, about not knowing if you'll ever make it home, about not knowing whether home will really be there when you do make it back. Favourite songs are Mother of Mercy, Coming Home, Starblind and (#1 winner) The Talisman, but honestly, there's not a single miss on the whole tracklist.

Secondly, Black House by Secrets of the Moon is gorgeously moody, heavy goth rock by a black metal band that finally decided to stop will-they-won't-they-ing and straight-up cross the party floor. I really love the frontman's voice, and how the band's metal origins shine through so clearly in the sense of energy and urgency that infuses every track.

Finally, some singles! 1914 have released a new track, 1916 (The Südtirol Offensive), that hits so fucking hard, especially in the second half. The outro riff has been running through my head for DAYS now, I love it so much, holy shit. I'm extra glad I have this to savour, because the new Aephanemer single, La Règle du Jeu, isn't doing anything for me. There's nothing WRONG with it I don't think - it's just leaning hard on the parts of Aephanemer's style that I don't love and neglecting the parts that I do. Marion Bascoul, please don't go where I can't follow!

Current Mood: contemplative

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All the Yesterdays

It's been long enough since I used this site, I've half forgotten how it works... (Like riding a bike, it comes back quickly.)

I was going through my old LiveJournal a bit earlier. (I admit, I was feeling a little nostalgic. A little maudlin).

I started that journal in September of 2001. I was 18.

It's nearly September, 2025. I'm 42.

You wonder where the years go...and with a journal like that, you can quickly and easily see the progression from smart but not-quite-wise teenager to smarter and wiser 20-something to smart, jaded and tired 30-something who trails off on posting because there is just too much stuff on the daily to spend time navel gazing the way she used to, especially when it comes to navel gazing online in a semi-public forum.

But I do miss journaling like this, taking the time to write about my day or dump out whatever thoughts were swirling in my head. (I've tried long hand journaling this year with a mix of bullet and traditional and I'm finding it to be...mostly a reminder of how fast time flies. I plan to finish the journal, but I need to revisit my approach in 2026.)

I miss the connections I used to make. (Some people I still have as friends here on Dreamwidth. Some I carried over to other social media for a while. Some have disappeared into ether of the internet. Some of have died.)

I'm still planning to keep this mostly as a fandom oriented space (though, as you can see - well "you" being the nebulous idea of a person who may actually be reading this blog from time to time - I don't even post fandom related content very often, as my creativity has taken a dive over the last however long) but with maybe the occasional visit to what I'm doing or thinking on the day to day.

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media: books

Spooky scary reading post

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is lesbian sci-fi survival horror about a climber, Gyre, who falsifies her credentials to secure a suspiciously well-paid cave exploration job. She ends up being sent down completely on her own, with her handler Em supervising her from the surface via a link to her high-tech suit. The suit is designed to meet all her survival needs while completely locking in all heat, sound, smells and other signs of life, since a known major risk of caving on Gyre's planet is attracting the notice of giant rock-eating worms called Tunnelers. She is enclosed in the suit 24/7, unable to touch her own skin or feel air on her face; her digestive tract has had to be surgically modified so that, for the approximately month-long duration of the mission, all her meals will be injected straight into her stomach from one port in the suit and the waste extracted automatically from another.

Alone in the dark, Gyre quickly learns that she's far from the first to attempt this cave - Em has been sending down dozens of cavers, none of whom have made it to the objective and a horrific number of whom have died in the attempt. Em is dangerously obsessed with the mission and willing to use any means at her disposal - manipulating Gyre's perception of reality through the suit controls, remotely administering drugs, blackmailing Gyre over the fake credentials - to force Gyre to continue. Trapped together by the mission and with no one else to talk to, a toxic, paranoid, codependent romance starts to blossom between Em and Gyre. Meanwhile, it's becoming increasingly clear that something is badly wrong down in the cave, but Gyre can't tell whether it's malicious sabotage, paranormal activity or her own sanity giving out on her due to stress and isolation. All she knows is that terrifying accidents keep happening and that with each one, her chances of surviving the mission are dropping lower and lower.

I loved this. The highest-impact horror came from the sheer claustrophobia, both inside the cave and inside the suit; it was so intense that if I read for too long in one go I started feeling physically squeezed. Both characters were fantastic, and I loved how the necessary minimalism of the premise forced me deep inside their heads, in much the same way they were forced inside each others. The unhealthy romantic chemistry really worked for me. If I have one complaint, it's that the amount of technical detail about caving sometimes got too much. For someone whose entire knowledge of climbing as a pastime has been conferred across maybe half a dozen bouldering gym visits in my life, there were places where the descriptions of Gyre's gear and techniques, and the specific kinds of climbing obstacles she faced, got kind of confusing. But I think to a point that was unavoidable, given the close third POV and the fact that Gyre has virtually nothing else to focus on besides those details, that her survival depends on getting them all exactly correct. Once I got into the swing of the novel I found that if I found my mind starting to wander on a technical passage, it was fine to just skim it instead of trying to absorb every detail; I may not understand the specifics of what Gyre was up to at a given point with her lines and anchors and camming devices, but the implications would generally become crystal clear within another paragraph or so.

We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough is a Gothic-flavoured paranormal thriller about a troubled het couple, Emily and Freddie, who move to a spooky old house in the English countryside. Emily immediately detects something horrible and supernatural going on within the house, but Freddie is skeptical; and in addition to clashing over whether or not their new home is haunted, they've both got their hands full keeping secrets from each other about their past potentially marriage-ending misdeeds. I don't want to say too much about the plot of this, because all the pleasure is in the suspense; unlike The Luminous Dead, which luxuriates in atmospheric creepiness, We Live Here Now clips along at a pace that prioritises action and takes a fairly impressionistic approach to its Gothic setting. But I will say that it's compulsively readable, pleasantly scary throughout, and that the final twist was a lot of fun. These characters are really not likeable, at all, and the whole thing manages to sit in a very relaxing place where I don't exactly want either of them to come to harm but I'm also not about to cry if they do. They're just kind of shitty people who don't deserve to be living in a supernatural horror story because no one deserves that, but they've very much brought the more mundane disintegration of their lives upon themselves. (Especially Freddie. Emily has her redeeming features but Freddie just straight up belongs in the fucking trash, sorry not sorry.)

This is the second novel I've read by this author and I liked it enormously better than the first. Behind Her Eyes hit some of the same notes - unlikeable, unprincipled characters being boiled alive in the soup of their own secrets seem to be Pinborough's thing, and her command of pacing is rock solid - but the shock! twist! ending annoyed the snot out of me. While trying once more to avoid spoilers, let's just say that Behind Her Eyes genre-hops in a way that felt to me like cheating. We Live Here Now is thankfully more upfront about and true to its genre, and starting from a place of properly calibrated expectations made for a much more enjoyable reading experience. It's not a must-read, but if you enjoy fast-paced thrillers and spooky haunted(?) houses, it's well worth the time.

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media: books

Reading post

My big surge of creative energy seems to petering out, but that means I’ve been getting a bunch more reading done again! Mostly light, tropey and romance-heavy at the moment, because ~~girls~~ chronically exhausted mums just wanna have fun.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots: Anna Tromedlov, an underemployed data analyst, scrapes her living by temping for professional supervillains who need henchpeople on demand. When an unlucky encounter with a superhero leaves her devastatingly injured - not to mention costing her the job she needs to pay her medical bills - Anna becomes obsessed with mathematically quantifying the damage heroic activity causes and publishing her findings on her unexpectedly successful new blog. This catches the eye of notorious supervillain Leviathan, who takes her under his wing and sets her to work destroying his enemies using the somewhat unconventional weapons of data analysis and PR savvy. So begins the meteoric rise of a brand new villain: the Auditor.

I unreservedly adored this book. It's a clever, tongue-in-cheek subversion of the superhero genre that balances biting social commentary with straight-up riotous fun. It's very bisexual and chock full of enticing shiptease - I was most into Anna/Leviathan, but could happily be sold on any or all of Anna's romantic prospects. It also, if you'd like a little taster, got this delightful fic written for it a few Yuletides ago (premise: excerpts from an in-universe advice column) that you can absolutely read canon-blind, and that imo does a really great job at capturing the novel's tone and sense of humour.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Sutanto: Sixty-year-old first-gen Chinese immigrant Vera owns a shabby tea shop in San Francisco. Her husband is dead, her son is distant, and her customers are almost nonexistent, so when a dead body is found in the shop one morning, she latches onto the rare chance to feel needed and takes it upon herself to investigate what she is convinced (despite the police's opinions to the contrary) is a murder.

This is a funny, cosy mystery novel that's really about found family that's really about the painful cultural tug-of-war between Asian parents and their westernised children. Vera is a wonderful character: she's overflowing with love but only knows how to express it within a framework of filial piety and age-based hierarchy that's incompatible with the younger generation's values. She has never met a boundary she didn't feel entitled to violate. She's both clever and batty, compassionate and insensitive, insightful and oblivious. She's the novel's star attraction by such a large margin that I was kind of disappointed by the choice to alternate her POV with those of her suspects, a pack of hapless Millenials/early Zoomers whose voices are indistinguishable from each other. I really just wanted to stay in Vera's head the whole time. Also the author, like so many authors, honestly needs to have her writing-small-children privileges taken away from her, because the toddler character is at so many wildly different developmental stages all at once that the scenes with her gave me whiplash. Despite those complaints, this was a really fun read brimming with fond humour and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who finds any part of my description appealing!

Hex Appeal by Kate Johnson: I "read" this as an audiobook, which is new for me. Normally I reserve audio format for rereads of books I already know well enough that it doesn't matter if my attention drifts here and there, which it invariably does when I try to absorb any kind of information without text or visuals to anchor me. As challenges to my preferred information processing style go, a tropey romance novel about witches seemed approachable. And it was! I enjoyed it! But I feel like I need to add a disclaimer that a few points have probably been knocked off my reading comprehension score on this one due to sheer poor listening skills.

Anyway, like I said, this is a tropey romance novel about witches. Specifically, it's about a plump, sensible, emotionally unavailable witch named Essie who lives in modern-day, magic-oblivious England and has weather-based powers. Her coven lives under a memory spell that makes everyone forget they exist whenever they're not directly needed, and her love life came to a premature end some years ago when she accidentally froze the penis off her last boyfriend. When a sad American man inherits the estate that includes the coven's home, he comes sniffing around for rent and gets massively more than he bargained for - partly because of his irresistible chemistry with Essie, and partly because of spooky hijinks involving time travel, witch trials and a centuries-old evil rising from slumber. It was a lot of fun! It did manage to hit a pet peeve of mine (shallow girlboss-feminist takes on historical womanhood and the struggles thereof, ugh go awayyy) but...well, again, tropey romance novel about witches. I came for the vibes, and the vibes sparked enough joy that I'm prepared to overlook a bit of painfully heavy-handed “witch hunters were really just ye olde incels” discourse.

Not in Love and Deep End by Ali Hazelwood: The Ali-verse is moving further and further away from my personal preferences, and I’m slightly bummed about it. I read Ali Hazelwood for pathetic lovelorn dudes with questionable social skills and nonexistent sex lives, and the tastefully younger women who are in Mariana-deep denial about their attraction to them. These last couple of male protagonists have been getting much suaver and more dominant - a little bit Christian Grey, if Christian Grey started caring about social justice and RACK - and the sex has been kicking off with nary a pine, nary a yearn, nary a moment of “she’ll never love me” despair. Good for you, Christian Grey-lite girlies, but that’s not my kink at all. :( Ali’s writing is still snappy and compulsively readable, and I imagine I’ll keep picking her new novels up from the library once they’ve been out long enough to be shelved instead of on waitlists, but I’m not going to prioritise them anymore unless I hear reliable reports that Grumpy Adam Driver is back on the menu.

Honourable (or dishonourable?) mentions to a couple of recent DNFs as well: The Love Wager by Lynn Painter (unreadably bad, I gave up a few chapters in) and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (extremely promising, and I’ve loved her work before, but this one started with a scene of heartwrenching child harm that I only wish I’d noped out of sooner). I’m not sure what I’m going to read next. I have some Deep End left, but after that I’m thinking I might pick up something a bit more serious in tone - variety, spice of life, etc. Guess we’ll see whether the whim holds when it actually comes time to choose.