coruscantknave

[coruscantknave]

Hey. Walk with me. Undersiders Beach episode.

[coruscantknave]

[coruscantknave]

An “I can see when people will die displayed above their heads” story but it is not the time of their death. It’s the order.

[coruscantknave]

Do you still write amazingly terrifying fanfiction?

Not super duper recently since I've been in a bit of a slump due to life things. BUT you can have these:

Prometheus [Ao3 link]

Sham Sacrifice part 1, Sham Sacrifice part 2, [Ao3 link]

Exclusion Zone chapter 1 [Ao3 link]

Also also, if you would care for non-fanfiction, you can have these:

Savit-e,

938 Seconds Per Second,

Above Their Heads,

God's Favorite,

Before the Birds Sing

[coruscantknave]

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[coruscantknave]

i cant believe ive never seen anyone draw fanart of the slumber party at dream bubble canaan house

[coruscantknave]

Bothersome beast, comforting friend

[coruscantknave]

2025 Book Review #43 – Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

I honestly don’t know how this series first ended up on my radar, but I found the first book in it to be enjoyably silly and mindless fun. Since I was going backpacking and would need some enjoyable beach read while well out of cell reception, I picked this up and – whatever its failings and missed opportunities – it did succeed at that with flying colours. I do not, honestly, think I would have enjoyed it much in many other contexts, but as fun disposable extruded genre product it did in fact fit the bill.

Following the events of the first book in the series – and the wild success of his book based upon them – Ernest Cunningham’s life has improved significantly. Dating the (now quite wealthy) former owner of the ski hill where it took place (and author of her own quite profitable memoir based on the whole serial killer thing), with a worryingly competent literary agent and a sizable advance on his next book – and even an invitation to the 50th Australian Mystery Writers convention, held aboard a luxurious historic train travelling directly across the continent. He hopes the event will be a cure for his crippling writer’s block and – as every other panellist seems to be trapped in a web of grudges with each other, and one of them drops dead in dramatic fashion – he does in fact get what he wished for.

So just as with Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (the first book in the series), this is an incredibly self-aware series, more genre pastiche that relies upon ones familiarity with and affection for various mystery tropes to really land than something that can be read naively. Incredibly self-aware and, for me at least, more than a bit insufferably so. All the cutesy asides about how what a coincidence it is that the events Ernest is living through so neatly match the pacing of a schlocky mystery novel, the asides reassuring the reader that he is a fair narrator and this is a fair mystery, the listing of how many times each suspect’s name has been used to help you guess who it will be and – it starts to grate, eventually. Whedonesque. Worse, it just feels like empty padding.

Which is a shame, because the core conceit of ‘a bunch of hackish mystery writers who all hate each other are in some isolated locale when the bodies start dropping’ is one I find incredibly charming. But it’s a difficult thing to keep that self-aware a premise form getting too meta and tongue-in-cheek to take even slightly seriously, and I found this went well over the line. Not to the point where it didn’t work as popcorn, but it wasn’t far off at points. Each character felt like little more than a one-line improv prompt and a series of secrets listed as bullet points, there were simultaneously b- c- and d-plot side-mysteries that fit together too neatly and perfectly for my suspension of disbelief but were never that interesting in their own right, and all the smirking at the camera meant there wasn’t really room for any of the plot points or character beats that were interesting to breath.

Iwas going to say that the end result was like a lesser Knives Out sequel, but that’s honestly unkind to the amount of charm and humour Benoit Blanc brings. The better comparison is to say it’s like an inexplicably Australian mid-season episode of Castle. Now I actually liked silly mid-season episodes of Castle as I watched them, so I really am being harsh here. But just, god, you could have done the same idea here so much better. I can see it in my dreams.

This is very clearly a post-#metoo book, which I mention because it’s really the only remotely interesting theme or ideological stance the book possesses. It’s not exactly graceful (okay, no, it is incredibly clumsily integrated at points) but at least its heart is in the right place?

Anyway yeah, this is a fun brainless beach book that did in fact eat up a pleasant couple of afternoons. I really can’t say too much for its virtues otherwise, besides the fact that beneath all the winking at the camera it is a competently executed fair play mystery. I just dearly wish that, if it was doing this, it went all-in and was less surface level in its understanding of the publishing industry and that the psychologies of the different writers/suspects were allowed to have a whole second dimension each.

[coruscantknave]

Ughh I miss this show

[coruscantknave]

[coruscantknave]

[coruscantknave]

[coruscantknave]

ouhuyhuhhh pyrrha...... :(

[coruscantknave]

Labyrinth in her interlude (pls click for better quality image)

couldnt resist doing a second fake comic cover and labyrinth's interlude is one of my favourite chapters sooooo it had 2 happen😊 idk i just love her

rightmost image is the pose ref i used. anime figures are super fun to reference would recommend

[coruscantknave]

behold my kitty comic

bonus:

[coruscantknave]

You think they ever run into each other

[coruscantknave]

Offering no further data or reason for the information’s release, an ominous new report published Tuesday by anonymous researchers from an unknown institution just lists places to hide. “Underground tunnels, remote cabins in the woods unreachable by vehicles, and caves in desolate mountain regions are all acceptable locations in which to stay hidden,” read the foreboding report, which went on to state that hiding on an uninhabited island, in an abandoned building, or beneath a pile of corpses belonging to people who didn’t hide well enough were also good options.

Full Story