punk-lucifer

[punk-lucifer]

[punk-lucifer]

another of the ways in which fiction absolutely lied to me and not prepared me at all for real life is friend groups.

Every story always has the one specific well defined friend group where everyone knows everyone else and is equally close to each other and dont hang out with anyone else outside of the friend group. Did you ever notice how absurdly pervasive that is in fiction?

im real life friend groups are this amorphous thing where not everyone knows each other and have different relations with each other and you will usually have multiple friend groups completly isolated from each other who in turn are conected to other groups totally divorces from yours and sometimes you will also have some one on one friendshios with some people who are not part of any group, and some times you will spend your time with people who are not "friends" but friends of friends or coworkers or what have you and its so incredibly messy and complicated and i dont know if any piece of fiction was ever able to truly capture that in its full complexity

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anyway you should always remember that all those foreigners you see dying on the news are just as real people as you are who have just as much interiority as you do. there is nothing about you that makes you more important and it is by pure chance that you are not in their position. in fact, this holds for all of history. every person, no matter the horror of the fate that befell them, had just as much interiority as you do. i feel like some people haven't fully internalized this.

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hi besties in my phone. i hope today is so so good to you. i hope something special happens to remind you that it’s not always bad. ily.

[punk-lucifer]

cats can activate keyboard shortcuts you cannot even concieve of

[punk-lucifer]

All Of Us Murderers (ARC review)

KJ Charles’ foray into the gothic romance is a playful romp with a genre-savvy narrator, zigzagging tropes (some deconstructions, some played straight, many justified), and a cast of mostly awful but compelling characters. There’s ghosts, sacrificial altars, a family curse, a fortune to be won; and, of course, they’re all trapped in the house until the situation can be resolved.

Zebedee is a fantastic lead and I’m glad to have been in his head the whole time. He knows a lot about gothic novels but is a bit bad at life. He has a web of complex relationships- he’s got a difficult family life, he’s lost his job at the start of the book, and the relative that summoned him is employing the love of his life as an assistant. Oh, and the love of his life has not forgiven or forgotten their previous encounters. I admire that Zeb as a character always chooses deliberately to be kind and decent, and take the most charitable way to understand others. This deep empathy really endears him to the reader, and I admire that KJ makes it clear that this is never an easy choice.

Another thing that I admire about Zeb is that KJ has thought carefully about how to put neurodivergence rep into a historical novel without being ahistoric but also without being clunky in the way ADHD is presented. I appreciated her note regarding the multiple sensitivity readers used - this is a great thing for authors to do, and I would love more of them to be open about it. KJ has never shied away from presenting historical realities while still writing glorious and sensitive LGBT relationships, and this holds true for the representation here. 

The romance? Gideon and Zeb are a second-chance pair, but despite Gideon’s demeanour the first time he appears on the page you long for him to come back as it’s so clear how Zeb feels. It feels emotionally mature in the way they come together and are able to reflect on the past- even though they are in the middle of a gothic whodunnit! I will admit to being semi-biased, as I love hotmess/competent and also the sex scenes were Up My Alley. 

But what about this gothic murder mystery? I am less experienced with the gothic myself, so if you’re a massive gothic fan, I can’t help. I thought the setting was glorious. I am still thinking about the description of the house’s library- constellations on the ceiling, green leather armchairs, oak shelves and a spiral staircase in the middle, if you were wondering - the fact it belonged to a crazy old gothic novel writer notwithstanding. Every element of the house and garden works carefully with the plot of the book, and while Zeb never knows where he’s going, I as the reader certainly had a fully realised concept of the house in my head.

For the mystery, I think something KJ does very well is play with the victim-criminal-murderer dynamic. Sometimes you start believing a character is one thing, and then the scene changes, and they are suddenly very different. Transformation and nothing being as it seems are clear themes here, but also power and who holds it. 

It’s a very clever, tongue-in-cheek take on both gothic and murder mystery- I do really need to go back and see if I can find some penny dreadful style gothic pulp; if nothing else, just because KJ clearly had so much fun coming up with titles for in-universe gothic novels!

(ARC copy received for free via NetGalley as a KJC discord member. All thoughts are my own. I was not paid to write the review or give it a set score)

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Feeling an incredibly weird specific nostalgia but what piece of media defined 2020 for you (as in you spent that year with it) mine is mtv's catfish

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at some point you have to realize that you actually have to read to understand the nuance of anything. we as a society are obsessed with summarization, likely as a result of the speed demanded by capital. from headlines to social media (twitter being especially egregious with the character limit), people take in fragments of knowledge and run with them, twisting their meaning into a kaleidoscope that dilutes the message into nothing. yes, brevity is good, but sometimes the message, even when communicated with utmost brevity, requires a 300 page book. sorry.

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"Let's hope he leaves without getting loads of our women pregnant after buying them nylons."

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- "Fatiha didn't join in that cos she's not a horse." - "No, and she's not fucking Lassie either, bruv."

Taskmaster S19E07

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[punk-lucifer]

Eat this yoghurt with the most dignity. Most extreme eating wins.

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“The original orgies and bizarre sex were perfectly sufficient” I am always saying this

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I guess a more general version of the point is that in the last 50-ish years, everyday language has borrowed more and more of both the terminology and structural features of technical language. This happens for a lot of reasons. But I think it's mostly not a good thing. For one, being abstract and technical is not actually very useful in the messy real world, where concepts are fuzzy and vague and most things of importance are not quantifiable. For another, if natural language borrows too much of the authority of science and the law, it might find that there's not enough left afterwards for science and the law to do what we need them to do.

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"But that ship is toxic and problematic" okay ❤️ yay ❤️

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STOP! before you decide you are irretrievably doomed, try one of the following options:

transition

bdsm

iron supplements

[punk-lucifer]

I've been enjoying Murderbot so far