#duddits

[cute-angi]

"Dreams age faster than dreamers."

Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

[joshuagjinsole]

Book Review: "Dreamcatcher" by Stephen King

Read my review for King's "Dreamcatcher!" @StephenKing #dreamcatcher #stephenking #duddits #horror #scifi #aliens

For book ten of 2023, I took on Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. I’d heard in circles—and from King himself—that Dreamcatcher wasn’t anything special. Some considered it poor, as far as King’s standards go. The story revolves around a group of boys/men (it bounces forward and backwards in time). This group once did something heroic as children, and that action now affects them as adults. In the…

[humanmorph]

i finished the tommyknockers today and it was pretty good! a very readable stephen king novel.

i listen to Just King Things but dont usually read the books theyre talking about unless its one ive read before (and liked) OR its kind of short anyways. the tommyknockers was neither (my copy has 693 pages!) so i actually started listening to the episode when it was out like normal but then they just kept saying how good the tommyknockers was so i paused it like 15 minutes in with a vague ‘well i GUESS ill check this out sometime’

and then a month ago i found it in a basket in front of a shop (the owner was just selling old books) so i bought it. anyways yeah i did like this. im excited to get back to the Just King Things episode.

[ghostsinthecellar]

I don’t like when it’s my turn to pick the movie because then I have to face how sad so many of my favorites are lol

[quartersety-of-a-holsety]

I DUDDITS!!!!!!!!!!!

[brightbeautifulthings]

Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

"SSDD: Sometimes it's just what you say. And sometimes you believe in nothing but the darkness. And then how do you go along?"

Year Read: 2005, 2023

Rating: 4/5

Thoughts: Against all logic, I still love this book. I read it for the first time in high school after instantly falling in love with the movie, and it was one of those books I practically memorized and internalized so hard that I don't even realize some of my thinking comes from here (until I'm rereading and going omg that's where that idea came from). It isn't just nostalgia that makes me love it though. As you probably know from my reviews, I went through a breakup, a summer depression, and a hideous book slump (the latter two from which I'm still clawing my way free). I was a little afraid to reread this, fearing it wouldn't hold up and that would only make the slump worse, but I flew through this like I was still a teenager, devouring books at a time when all of them are still new and wonderful. It might be the easiest reading I've done all year, and I was happy to sink back into King's world with my old Derry friends.

Objectively, I know this is not King's best. It's brutally gory, scatological, and full of some downright repulsive body horror. Had I not already internalized King's aliens at a young age and accepted them as perfectly fine, I might have been way more put off by his unnecessarily gross biology. (Although one need only look at the chest-bursting Xenomorphs to know this is practically standard for the genre. I don't think there's anything in here worse than that, and they're about on par for truly awful ways to die.) I'm not even typically a fan of alien novels, so this already beats the odds.

Assuming you can get past the gore, or that you're as desensitized to it as I am, it's also extremely ableist in its characterization of Douglas Cavell ("Duddits", affectionately), a character with Down's Syndrome who is also the magical key to defeating a race of aliens. King frequently falls into this unfortunate trope of giving his minority characters super special (and often stereotypical) magical powers, and Duddits has the added advantage of Incorruptible Pureness even in the face of bullying, cancer, and gut-eating aliens. There are also frequent slurs, "retard" being the most frequent, and it's used even by the main characters. It forces readers into the awkward position of being grateful to even see a disabled character portrayed positively, while recognizing that the characterization comes with its own issues.

Yet, I find myself returning to my original thesis: Despite its very real and present problems, I adore this book, and it's really the characters that make or break it. I fell in love with Duddits, Jonesy, Henry, Beaver, and Pete at first sight, and their friendship is at the heart of the novel. King does characters and childhood friendships so well, and Dreamcatcher's live and breathe off the page every bit as much as the Loser's Club from IT. I love them in the flashbacks and the present timeline, and their love and loyalty to each other effortlessly carry the story.

Despite its hefty page-count (nearly 700), the pace never lagged for me either, and I never found myself getting bogged down in the minutiae of the history or world-building the way I sometimes do with King. It's fairly well-focused on character development and moving the plot forward, and the only times my interest waned were in Kurtz's chapters. He's a fairly banal villain alongside Mr. Gray, and I would always rather spend my time with the boys and their odd, Shining-like power. I'd forgotten a lot of the differences between the book and movie lore, aside from the very obvious differences in the endings, so that was a fun comparison as well. I think it works without getting too in-depth about why the aliens work the way they do (but I've also been hugely spoiled by Mira Grant's deep dives into supernatural biology). All in all, this is still one of my favorite King novels, and I won't be hesitant to read it again when I want to visit my friends.

[bekah-reading]

2023 Mid-Year Book Tag

Best book you’ve read so far

Haunting Adeline by HD Carlton

Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Manicalco

Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far

Twisted by Emily McIntire

Hunting Prince Dracula by Kerri Maniscalco

Vein Pursuits by Rhett C. Bruno

Best New Release You’ve Read So Far

Immortality by Dana Schwartz

How to Sell A Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

New Release you haven’t read but want to

Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

Most Anticipated Release for the 2nd half of the year

Crossed by Emily McIntire

The Ashfire King by Chelsea Abdullah

Heartstopper Vol 5 by Alice Oseman

Biggest Book Disappointment

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker

Most Surprising Book of the Year

The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

Most Beautiful Book You’ve bought this year

What books do you need to read before the end of the year?

Being really hopeful- but I’d love to end the year with no physical TBR other than my November bday and Christmas gifts.

But barring that- Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, The Hacienda, Area X, Jurassic Park, and Love, Theoretically.

How many books have you read this year so far?

65 books.

What have you been reading?

Horror, Gothic, Romance, Dark Romance, Short Story Collections, Sci-fi, YA Fantasy, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Extreme Horror, Splatterpunk, Western.

Out of Comfort Zone

None-I have yet to step out of my comfort zone this year.

Books that made you happy

The Stardust Thief, Twisted, Illuminae series, Stalkign Jack the Ripper series.

New Favourite Author

Kerri Maniscalco

Chelsea Abdullah

H.D. Carlton

New Favourite Crush

Zade Meadows (I had no hesitation to put his name down)

Thomas Cresswell

Crowley from The Black Badge Series

Shadow and Venom

Qadir

Julius

Newest Favourite Character

Audrey Rose and Thomas Cresswell

Sibby

Noemí and Francis

Tarquin

Duddits

Books that made you cry

Dreamcatcher- not ashamed to admit it.

The Stardust Thief

[nokingsonlyfooles]

My Own, Personal Art Week: Here's Ann!

Ann's tarot card! Part of a series! More description and various notes under the cut!

Ann would say, "When the flashbulbs start going off, there's bound to be broken glass, so always wear a good pair of shoes, dear!"

I'm licensing everything Tin Soldier/Soldier On under creative commons, NC-BY-SA. So take! Share! Just give credit, add value, and don't sell it!

Ann and Milo are two people sharing a body, their concept has gone through a lot of evolution, and sometimes they come off a bit problematic. For which I apologize!

At the beginning, I saw them as an opportunity to play with gender and superhero tropes and that's all, but they've been picking up intersections like a goddamn Katamari as I write, and I can only do so much. Part of this is because I based Milo's social issues on my own, and I've been finding out more and more about what my deal is since I started writing Tin Soldier. For example, "Shit, I don't care about gendered clothes because I'm nonbinary, don't I? Aw, damn it." Then I gotta open some documents and make edits - but never that many. I know what my deal is, I just have to update how I talk about it.

I also know how annoying it is to see your real-life human condition portrayed as something magical or mystical in nature. (I've seen the book and the movie iterations of Duddits, and I'm not a fan.) The Calvin-and-Hobbes-like ambiguity of Ann's nature may be a bit frustrating, but I don't want to box her up as 100% dissociated identity. I want to make people think about what makes a person a Real Person - if I give a definite answer on what's going on, they'll evaluate her on that basis and stop thinking! (Besides, I've never been 100% accurate on what's going on with them in the first place!)

Milo is definitely 100% autistic, though! And Ann is his mask. Instead of managing all that scary social stuff himself, he outsourced it. "Math is easy," Ann would say, "so let's go shopping!" (Shopping is indeed a social and logistical nightmare, if you're doing it right.) She's a born performer - literally - so it's only natural she has a job in entertainment, just not quite at that level of fame. I added the flashbulb pieces for this version of her card, the original doesn't have them...

...but it just makes sense. With good shoes, that sort of thing is no bother.

It's hard to tell on Tumblr, but the original format is wider. I decided to make my tarot cards tarot-card shaped. If I ever finish all of them, I might get them printed. (However, the Major Arcana reversals all have their own illustrations, so it would be a very large or very odd deck.) Narrower, simplified format means I lost the treble clef and time signature! Just couldn't fit it in there in a way that looked good. Not too important, but I liked that the song was in 4/4 time.

There are eight, eight-pointed "stars," like in Rider-Waite's The Star. Not sure of the ultimate significance there (17 does reduce to 8 in numerology), but I like the look. As far as fire and water go, Ann and Milo have both (a water vase and flashbulbs for Ann, rain and lightning for Milo), which means they've lost some things, and burned some things down too. Ann isn't pouring her water out, but she's about to lose it because she's not paying attention. She might catch herself, she's good at that, but if she doesn't, it's no big deal. No point crying over spilled symbolic imagery!

I hid some little lightning bolts in with the glass. Milo's card has a BIG lightning bolt (or it will, when I get done with the redraw) and it's scaring the hell out of him. Ann knows how to take things like that in stride.

The design is a compromise between my upright cards and my reversals, since Ann is both. Reversals are usually on a black background with some significant song lyrics, and uprights have that old paper background. She gets a little of each. And she's got the music on her card, but Milo's got the words - which, in his case, are not lyrical at all, but you'll see when I get to him.

She doesn't have two bowls like that other Star, but that vase she's carrying has two handles to help hold it! Make of it what you will. (Milo would say one of those handles is broken and can't hold a damn thing, but Ann knows he wrong about that.)

And Ann's card has an original crappy version - which I shall now share with you for being a good reader and sticking with me for the whole post.

And if you got hit with this post on random and you're curious, Tin Soldier and Soldier On are a long, serialized story I'm writing, and you can read all of Tin Soldier for free right now! (You may also read some of Soldier On for free right now, it's just on hiatus while I do art and various other stuff.) See you there!

[reddie-ao3feed]

Growing Pains

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/hqIPndi by The_Magic_Lava_Lamp The Tozier-Kaspbrak household was unsettlingly quiet when Beaver decided to pull himself away from his studying. He’d been noticing some sort of funny feeling ----‘Henry might know a better word for it.’---- pinching at his guts for the last month or so. He mostly kept that ‘funny feeling’ to himself. As he crossed the hallway to the stairs, he wondered what version of himself he’d take up today. Not that his problem was that serious or anything but he’d definitely keep the identity crisis to himself, no sense in worrying his family when Richie and Eddie already had so much going on. Words: 5732, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Fandoms: Dreamcatcher - Stephen King, IT - Stephen King Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Categories: M/M Characters: Joe "Beaver" Clarendon, Gary "Jonesy" Jones, Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier, Douglas "Duddits" Cavell, Henry Devlin, Pete Moore Relationships: Joe "Beaver" Clarendon/Gary "Jonesy" Jones, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/hqIPndi

[greysanguinity]

𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐄 // 𝐆𝐀𝐑𝐘 𝐀. 𝐉𝐎𝐍𝐄𝐒

AGE. 13 / 43 (verse dependent) NICKNAME. jonesy, jones, ambrose HEIGHT. 6'2" PROFESSION. private school professor PRONOUNS. he/him SEXUALITY. closet bisexual. married & had 4 children with his wife but it's been suggested that he isn't capable of loving women or emotionally pleasing them. DISABILITIES. physically disabled from being hit by a car. his hip is very much remade from metal, so he uses a cane when the weather is cold or the ground is slippery. he tries not to use it because he has internalized ableism. MENTAL. mild depression, mild alcoholism, can hear people's thoughts and this brings him to often stare into space/become disassociated because he's focusing on not reading someone's thoughts. talks to himself. after the invasion, jonesy's depression and disassociating gets worse for some time before leveling out.

BIO. jonesy was born in 1960 in derry, maine: 20 years after the events in the book IT. he was born into a middle class, affluent family as an only child. due to his isolation, jonesy was bookish and quiet for much of his years before meeting the dreamcatcher kids. after meeting them, he became their leader of sorts: he was the tallest out of them and he was fair to everyone.

eventually, after meeting duddits and getting his gift, jonesy struggles with mental illness in the form of being able to read minds without boundaries - something he still struggles to stop himself from doing. it didn't stop him from pursuing harvard as a college choice, however, and he and henry spent their college years together.

as an adult, jonesy is still struggling: his wife asked for a divorce and his children despise him for being absent, he's working through his fourth surgery for his hip and he's hooked on oxycontin. in short, jonesy is in a bit of a midlife crisis when the invasion makes things take a turn for the worst.

ABILITIES. the line is something jonesy's (and by extension, his gang) lived with for nearly his entire life. it comes to him as a boy, as a gift to him from the universe, it seemed; for that's what duddits was, he was a gift from the universe freely given to save the earth with whatever little spark was left in him.

the line is an invisible thread. it anchor's him to every human being on the planet and no person is exempt from the gifts they were given. jonesy, in particular, is in possession of a very strong line. the line gives him the ability to read other people's thoughts and to pull in the frequencies of other human beings like a radio tower: he doesn't need to be close for him to read a mind, but the frequency is stronger the more jonesy is emotionally attached to them.

his other gift, although not as strong as beaver's, is the ability to sense when something bad is going to happen. it comes in flashes like memory, as if he's recalling a thought that already happened - except it hasn't happened but it will. soon. TIDBITS.

jonesy has been a life long fan of all things space and alien's. he wanted to be an astronaught for NASA as a boy and he dressed up as Major Tom for Halloween for five years in a row as a boy; incidentally, the very reason why mr. gray is able to invade the earth as quickly, and as manipulatively as he is, is because of jonesy's vast mind full of alien movies and how humans work.

essentially, jonesy's intellect is what sped up the invasion and later, when mr. gray decided to poison the water supply, he was the one who stopped it by outsmarting him.

jonesy is half in love with henry. they were the closest out of their friends growing up and later, when they're all separated, he and henry still converse daily. he doesn't realize what he feels is romantic love, so he's stupidly devoted to him, but he does feel a deeply familial sense of love for him that often brings out the worst in him when henry finds partners/new friends.

drug use: jonesy has a slight addiction to popping his pills. due to the severity of his accident (being pronounced dead, he was resuscitated twice, went through 3 surgeries) his prescription has over a dozen refills and he's quick to share with friends. that being said, he's not at the point in his addiction that he'd be making irrational decision's to get more. he's in the budding stage.

sleeps with his students now and again

insomniac, eats very little, often gets dizzy because of this.

[todsterdude1]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Stephen King Novel

[tafadhali]

me, every time I fail to plan ahead for a Halloween costume: well, I do own every article of clothing worn by Duddits in Dreamcatcher...

[littledozerdraws]

DREAMBOYS + timelapse 🏔🌲👽☝️💫 

[stephenkingadaptations]

Duddits from Dreamcatcher

[cute-angi]

Tagged by @esperata​

Rule: list your favorite (male) characters from ten different fandoms

That's very difficult

SSDD - Same Shit Different Day

Stephen King's Dreamcatcher - Douglas Cavell

Duddits! There's no explanation there. It's Duddits! Love him!

The Riddler: Edward Nashton (Nigma)

I don't think it needs a big announcement that this was coming. As soon as I lost myself in Arkham and heard his transmissions, I was blown away. That's when I fell in love with him.

Final Fantasy XV - Verstael Besithia

I know what everyone is thinking right now. Why doesn't it say Ardyn? He's the cool villain after all. Or where are the chocobros? Nope... I already liked grumpy Verstael and then episode Ardyn just made me see pink-red as soon as I saw the trailer. (My interpretation of him, of course, has only become so "cold-hearted" over the years. You know how it is with fangirls...)

''The artist has a duty to seduce the ear and delight the spirit.... Say hello to an evening with Sander Cohen!''

Bioshock - Sander Cohen

I thought about it for a long time. And first I wanted to mention the Lutece twins. Those two are always my favorites. Then I thought of Augustus Sinclair. A man of honor! I love Sinclair. And Bioshock contains so many more brilliant characters. There are no bad ones. But then I just had to go with Cohen, because Fort Frolic won't let me go. Especially after reading Rapture and having more insight into his character. This man just so often reflects what most of us are like at our core. We are artists of the world and so vulnerable because of it. We walk the narrow path between madness and genius.

Because we're talking about artists...

The Evil Within - Stefano Valentini

I am, after all, someone who likes Tchaikovsky. And yes, of course the first game, was often better than the second. The second one didn't cost me much effort. I hardly managed the first one on easy at first. And Ruvik is one of the most interesting characters ever. But Stefano, like Cohen, has something ... strangely great about him.

Strange... I'm about to be hated by everyone.

Avatar The Last Airbender - Long Feng

Okay... okay... listen to me, please. Of course Iroh is the best character in the series and has helped me through so many stages of life.But I have a thing for really bad guys and as I get older, tastes change. Well, Long Feng is just sneaky? But he runs the Dai Li and through it he owns Ba Sing Se!  Hello? Of course I watch AsianDramas and yes please make me your queen. So I finally live behind safe walls.

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se" Okay... can the Dai li please adopt me as a lost princess?

Now that we have the embarrassing behind us, here comes something all too understandable:

Resident Evil (Village) - Karl Heisenberg

Instead of Male Characters, the rules should say, "Favorite Daddy Characters."

Okay...I have to do it...break the rules....

Mommy? Can I please stay up late and play with Bela, Cassandra and Daniela? I love this woman. Mommy!

Okay...don't forget the love for Donna!!!! Donna Beneviento~!!!!

Let's get serious again.

1, 2, 3, 4... Did you miss me, Monte d'Or?

Professor Layton - Descole

I triggered you guys with that quote, didn't I? Randal is really wonderful.I have just replayed Miracle Mask. But I've been in love with that damn guy since part 4. Descole is My childhood love that comes back every year.

Kingdom Hearts - Xehanort (And Eraqus)

Here again my love for evil. I never dared to admit that I love "Ansem" so much in the first game. Well..... now I'm allowed to and it's just the character around Xehanort that enchants me. But Xehanort doesn't exist on its own either. Only with the best of the best: Eraqus!

And now we come to the anime track:

Attack on Titan - Willy Tybur

I really like Levi a lot. But I'm also someone who tries to jump off the hype train. I like Levi. And I love Zeke Yeager. But with the first appearance of Willy Tybur in the manga... phew my heart. I was hoping at the time that he would still be the Warhammer. There' s a lot of content lost on his family.

Because we are talking about manga:

Naruto - Tobirama Senju (and Izuna Uchiha)

It's been a long time since I watched or read Naruto. But it helped me through my "most difficult time". I have the sign of the Senju clan tattooed on my back. And it always gives me strength to get through everything. And with Tobirama you also have to like Izuna. With him you love Madara and with this Hashirama. Oh these four... my heart.

[maekar76]

Dreamcatcher, 2003 -both words and gifs fail to express how stunningly terrible this movie is.