#how is 2014 already 9 years ago

[hkthatgffan]

After a year long hiatus, Scary-oke 's premiere marked the start of Gravity Falls season 2 August 1st...on this day...9 YEARS AGO!!

Yes, 2014 was 9 years ago! Gravity Falls 2nd and final season began 9 years ago! We were just celebrating the show turning 10 last year and next year we'll be marking 10 years since season 2 and in another 3 years, 10 years since the finale!

Time really is passing by like crazy, isn't it?

[tgmsunmontue]

Online & Anonymous 9/16

Hangster. Explicit. Years before they meet in person Bradley and Jake strike up a friends-with-benefits relationship online. And then something more like an actual relationship.

Odd year = Bradley's POV and Even year = Jake's POV

>>Bradley chatting (bold and italics)

>>Jake chatting (italics)

2005/2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

2014 – Jake

                Jake looks at the dates Nick has said he’s on leave and looks at his own calendar and scowls. It’s getting beyond a joke now and he feels like kicking something. Instead he goes for a long run, feet pounding the pavement in frustration. There’s nothing, not even a few days. Of course plans can change rapidly, which is what fucked them over in the past, so maybe it will act in their favor this time. He can only hope.

…            …            …

>>You know, with Taylor Swift’s new album I could put 1989 back in my username and everyone would assume I was just a fan.

>>You know who Taylor Swift is?

>>I’m a country fan. I like her older stuff.

>>Also I don’t live under a rock.

>>Old man.

>>Like you can talk.

>>You had your original birth year as 1986, you trying to make yourself younger now huh?

                Jake lets out a laugh, because this right here is how he knows he’s still talking to the same guy he started chatting to nearly ten years ago.

>>Nick, I’m thirty soon. That’s the age gay men die.

>>I’ll have a wake.

>>Bullshit. Don’t buy into that.

>>Life isn’t over when you magically turn 30.

>>Life just gets better. That’s how I feel anyway. Got my best years ahead of me.

>>Also I’m over thirty and I’m not chatting with you from my grave.

>>You might be. How would I know?

>>I might be dead by the time we actually get to meet the rate our luck is going.

…            …            …

                He knows the year is going to be a complete write-off when he enters the rec-room and Bradley Bradshaw is sitting there chatting with Omaha and Slipper. He can’t help but notice the two bars and tries to not let it bug him, knows it’s barely any distinction but it still rankles. As does the rejection, which is months ago now, it hadn’t been a stinging rejection by any stretch of the imagination, but it had definitely been a shutting down of anything, and those two-bars will be another reason or excuse Bradshaw will throw out there if Jake tries his luck again.

                Not that he will. He does note that Bradshaw hadn’t said he wasn’t gay, which is usually the first thing out of a straight man’s mouth when he’s asked out for a drink. Unless he’s completely oblivious, and if he’s being uncharitable then maybe he can think that Bradshaw is oblivious. But while he might not have taken Jake up on the offer of a drink, he’d been very quick to take Bambi out to dinner and then take her back to his place, where she’d spent the night. He’d thought he’d caught Bradshaw looking, but he wonders if it was just wishful thinking. Part of him wishes he was ignorant about all of it, but their base housing had all been too close for him not to notice.

                And now here he is.

                Stuck on a carrier with him for the next few months.

                And the fucker has gone and grown a fucking moustache.

…            …            …

                Fortunately Bradshaw seems to be content to keep his distance from Jake, almost like he’s wary of him; he also isn’t friendly, not like he is with nearly everyone else. Jake isn’t an idiot, he can extrapolate from that that Bradshaw doesn’t like him. He already suspected that was the case, and it rankles a little, but he tries to remind himself that not everyone has to like him. Something both Nick and Javy tell him. They’re in different squads, so fortunately the mutual avoiding each other is fairly straightforward.

                What does amuse him though is that Bradshaw has picked up a new callsign, Rooster, and the fact that he knows the origin makes him smirk every time he sees it on his helmet or flight suit. That probably doesn’t help endear him to the other man either, but Jake will keep his fairly benign callsign until someone gives him another one, or he does something either stupid or brave to earn one. He keeps up his Snapchat photo streak with Nick, although he does note the change of background of the morning coffee cup. Looks like every other fucking coffee cup on every naval carrier in the fleet.

                He looks up how many people are currently serving in the Navy and pulls a face at the number. 319,120. He’s one, and Nick is another. He supposes he should feel lucky that he at least knows Nick is Navy, because there are 1.35 million in the US military combined, which is an even more mind-boggling number when he tries to think about possibly of somehow just randomly bumping into Nick.

                Stranger things have happened though.

…            …            …

                “You don’t like me.”

                “I don’t know you,” Bradshaw replies, face bland and Jake responds with an equally bland smile.

                “And who’s fault is that?”

                He walks out of the rec room.

…            …            …

                He rings Javy to complain the next time they have shore leave, and for his credit Javy just lets him rant for a solid five or ten minutes before he tries to interject with anything.

                “Okay man. He really seems to get under your skin. I don’t know what to tell you, because I haven’t had any issues with him. He’s been… cool. He’s pretty chill and laid back, at least with all my interactions with him. Is there anything that you could have done that maybe annoyed him? More than just work shit that is…”

                “Oh. Uh.”

                “Jake… what’d you do?”

                “I asked him out?”

                “Seriously? With the whole attitude you gave him while we were at Top Gun you thought he’d say yes?”

                “I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.”

                “Well, I’m pretty sure he’s got something serious going with someone, at least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

                “Bunch of fucking gossips…”

                “Yeah well.”

                He suspects Javy has got his intel from Natasha Trace, and if that’s the case then it’s probably solid and correct. He doesn’t know what to think when he pairs that with the idea of Bradshaw having something serious but also having Bambi sleepover at the end of their Top Gun detachment. Unless the something serious is Bambi, which is also possible. Huh. He doesn’t say anything else though, because he doesn’t want to care anymore about Bradley fucking Bradshaw than he already does, annoying asshole. He does feel like he’s been a bit of a dick himself though, his comment he made about the fault being his that they don’t know each other. Jake isn’t usually that defensive, knows it’s got to be because Bradshaw turned him down, but he has to respect the guy if he does have something going with someone, because Jake wouldn’t have known, likely wouldn’t have ever found out, and he knows plenty of guys do.

                Too late to do anything about it now though.

…            …            …

>>You still out there having shitty sex?

>>Hey now.

>>I don’t go looking for bad sex.

>>It just happens to me.

>>You clearly have a gift.

>>Wow.

>>Thanks man.

>>Truly I am blessed.

>>You want a picture to cheer yourself up?

                Jake can’t type his reply fast enough, the pictures and videos that Nick sends him few and far between but so good, and he’s starting to develop a thing for long fingers. Especially when they’re wrapped around a cock, and he’s mentioned to Nick that the idea of Nick’s hand wrapping around both of them gets him hot. The picture that comes through is gorgeous, Nick reclining and the picture down the length of his body, one leg stretched straight, the other bent, his cock hard in his hand as he jerks himself. The lighting is warm, like it was taken at either sunset or sunrise, all pink and peach hues. They’ve both improved in taking pictures, and he takes a screenshot so he can stare at it properly later rather than getting flustered about the time bar getting smaller.

>>Saw you take that screenshot.

>>What are you going to do about it?

>>Nothing. Just letting you know that I know you’re going to jerk off to it more than once.

>>Yep.

>>Going to work myself over thinking about getting my mouth on you, sinking down on your cock.

>>I can’t exactly take toys with me when I’m deployed, but I can finger myself and imagine that it’s you.

>>God Jas. Send me a picture?

>>Sure thing.

…            …            …

                Bradley and his squadron leave the carrier after four months and Jake wishes he was leaving as well. Nick has leave soon, it would line up beautifully, but he’s got another three months of this deployment, and then he has four weeks of leave, but Nick is meant to be deployed again by then. The tide has not magically turned in their favor and lined up their leaves and he keeps his most bitter disappointment to himself.

…            …            …

>>Well, you aren’t the only one having shitty sex. Man some guys are dicks.

>>What happened ? Or should I not ask?”

>>Just a hook up. Blew the guy and he didn’t even reciprocate. Tried to give me a handjob but he wasn’t even trying or into it.

>>That doesn’t seem fair?

>>Well, it’s not always fair, but I’d kind of gone in hoping for reciprocation as a bare minimum. Ah well. Can only go up from here.

2015

[vashtijoy]

maruki, ren, wakaba: history rhymes

Maruki's journal entries cover an almost three-year period, from 2014/04/09 to 2017/01/01. This overlaps with almost the entirety of canon; Akechi begins working for Shido "two and a half years" before 11/21 (that's 2014/05/21)—which, again, is not too far from this 04/09 date; if you want to hypothesise that he, too, awakens around 2014/04/09, go wild.

Why is 4/9 a significant date for Maruki?

4/9: maruki and joker connect to their personas

According to his journal, Maruki's awakening is a painful, drawn-out process. In February 2014, he's already getting headaches. They worsen until August of that year, when he partially awakens.

His start of darkness is, of course, the murder of his girlfriend Rumi's parents. The killer then attacks Rumi while making his escape, and Maruki is powerless to prevent it. She never recovers, and neither does he:

Apr. 9   I just can't believe what's happened. I'll never see Rumi's parents again... I don't even know if Rumi will ever come back to me. Her heart's been completely closed off ever since that day. Why did this happen? What did Rumi do to deserve this?   Do we really have to just go on suffering these consequences? My headaches are getting worse— I'm even starting to hear things. Am I having some kind of breakdown? I can't lose it... I have to do something to help Rumi. No matter what it takes.

But 2014/04/09 is the first day he feels able to journal about the murder. "I'm starting to hear things," he says; this is likely the first day he hears the voice of his persona. It's also the date he commits to help Rumi "no matter what it takes".

... However. This is also two years to the day before Joker stops at Shibuya Crossing, gets the Meta-Nav from Yaldabaoth—who is lurking far beneath the Crossing—inadvertently enters the Metaverse, and sees his own shadow and the suggestion of the persona it will become:

He is a scary boy when he wants to be, huh? I bet his Palace would have been amazing. Note that Joker, here, will also not awaken right away—but he's seen his persona, his shadow-as-is, for the first time.

8/21: maruki's partial awakening and wakaba's murder

(@notcoolnickname points out that Wakaba dies on 8/21, not 8/22—thanks! I think we can push Maruki's awakening back two days rather than one, so I'm gonna, lol. Because even if it's a day out, or two, this is really too close for coincidence.)

On 2014/08/23, Maruki writes about his visit to Rumi in the hospital. We also see that visit. He talks about "someone" he's recently met who thinks his research has promise, who wants to fund it—well, it's no surprise he loses that funding, put it like that. He talks about how he wants to save the whole world, by changing the cognition of criminals before they act.

Rumi does not take this well; she begs him to help her forget. And he realises that what she needs is not a solution to crime, but to her trauma—and so does everyone else.

This is when he awakens.

He begs Azathoth to help him save Rumi. And Rumi forgets him entirely—almost. But she's forgotten her trauma, as well:

Aug. 23   I still can't figure out what that voice was in Rumi's room. Was it my subconscious? Was it... it feels so strange writing this as a scientist, but... was it some kind of godlike being?

The entry's dated 8/23, but he says he still can't figure it out. So when did the events in the video happen? Were they two days before, by any chance?

What else happens not just on 8/21, but around or on this exact day?

Yeah. On 8/22, Sae places Wakaba's murder "two years ago". The day before, on 8/21, Sojiro commemorates the anniversary of Wakaba's death.

That's to say: if that visit to Rumi was on 8/21, then Wakaba was murdered the day Maruki awakened. The same exact day, or as good as. Like, what the fuck, y'all?

It seems really clear to me that these corresponding dates are either a thematic or narrative link back to Yaldabaoth—who, of course, causes both Joker and Akechi to awaken. Is he involved with Maruki, somehow? Does he have his fingers in more than one pie? Or are all these guys just narratively echoing each other?

Maruki, of course, will ultimately replace Yaldabaoth in Mementos.

other correspondences in the timeline

What else is there? Well, Maruki's first journal entry, when he talks about his headaches, is on 2014/02/02—three years before he meets with Joker and Akechi at Leblanc. But he says he's meeting Rumi's parents "tomorrow". So his 2/3 boss fight is on the three-year anniversary of his first meeting with Rumi's parents.

His entry about his research being shut down, and his need for test subjects—presumably what leads him into counselling?—is on 2015/06/03. Well, 6/3 is the calling card deadline for Madarame's Palace; I don't think that is too significant. But note that, in this 2015 entry, his research has been shut down; in August 2014, when Wakaba was murdered, Shido was still offering Maruki funding.

So why didn't Shido murder Maruki? The answer is that Shido was still actively recruiting Metaverse researchers, even after Akechi was working for him. Something about Maruki made him unusable—his good intentions and general incorruptibility, maybe—but not dangerous; maybe he just didn't know enough. Also note here that Akechi doesn't know there's anything special about Maruki until the third semester.

He journals that he met Yoshizawa and changed her cognition on 3/25—a couple of weeks before canon begins on 4/9. So whenever we see him, whenever he has a counselling session, he's able to connect with, and change, the cognition of the person he meets....

Lastly, he doesn't journal that "I've finally done it... reality and the cognitive world are merging" until 1/1. 1/1 is the day reality starts to go properly squiffy (the shrine is empty, Morgana is missing, Futaba mentions her mom), and it's the day after that odd New Year party, when everyone seems just a little too happy. Joker's dream is on the night of 12/31—Maruki doesn't send him the dream, I think (Joker is in his prison clothes and sees Lavenza as the butterfly) but he talks to him in it.

But Akechi is there in Shibuya on 12/24, barely moments after Maruki gains Yaldabaoth's power; just hours after the blood rain. The first gift Maruki gave with his new power, I always thought. But he seems to only become aware of what he can do after 12/24. We skip from 12/25 to 12/30, so anything could have happened in the meantime....

But what's going on here? Something odd, that's for sure. Is it possible—just possible—that that Akechi we see, on 12/24, who steps forward in Shibuya and turns himself in, is not the one Maruki interferes with or otherwise brings back, but the actual, living Akechi who was there all along?

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

How many generations would it take the population to change their circadian rhythm when moving to a new planet? Their original planet had 22 hour rotations but their new planet has 38 hour rotations. Also, how would the generations in between adapt to life/arrange schedules when their physical cycle doesn't match the planet's day/night? If someone say ate breakfast at 9AM daily according to their own cycle, their breakfast time will vary at different times of the local day. Sounds rather confusing.

Tex: Chronobiology is a bit of a specialized field, and because of that, there’s still a lot of research being established about the subject. I haven’t found a lot of research on the presumed epigenetic component of altering the CLOCK gene (and and assorted related genes) that govern the circadian rhythm, but I’m going to guess that an individual could slowly adapt to a new planet, and that those adaptations would be reflected genetically in their lineage. How these changes show up - and correspond to the original expression of the gene(s) - is currently unknown, but since this is your world, you can play around with it.

Feral: Tex has already talked a bit about the biological aspect, so let’s talk about the environmental - specifically the built and social environmental aspects - which play more into your second question. How much control will settlers have over their built environment and how it is lit? What type of built environment will they have? In 2014 Alexander Gerst provided a look at his daily schedule on the ISS, showing a wake-up call for the astronauts at 6am and bedtime at 9:30pm (GMT). Among the other rows showing how their day is segmented into tasks, one row shows Day/Night, in other words when the station experiences daylight and when it experiences darkness. Remember that clocks are made up, and the clock you use to determine when breakfast is is not actually coordinating with the sun. Ptolemy defined a second somewhere around 150CE, but astronomically, not only was that not as precise as what we can measure now, the Earth is actually spinning several milliseconds faster than it was in the second century. Our concept of how many seconds there are in a day hasn’t changed; the length of a second (and therefore a minute and therefore an hour and therefore a day) has. Further, although we have a 24-hour cycle, day and night are not equal lengths throughout the year, yet jobs and schools do not shift timing to match. That’s not how it was a couple centuries ago, before electric lights became the norm, but social time has been quite static since - at least in monochronic cultures. A polychronic culture may adapt very differently to a different daily rhythm.

One note on scientific accuracy (if you care, but you are absolutely not required to care): the rotation of your planet taking 38 Earth hours may be too slow for comfortable habitability far beyond circadian rhythm. It’s not an outlandishly long time, but it’s worth considering what other environmental adaptations your people will need to make. Daily scheduling might be the easiest thing they’ll have to overcome.

Synth: Over the decades there have been several studies on how human circadian rhythms shift when deprived of external cues. There are many body processes that exhibit cyclical patterns (core body temp, various endocrine functions and levels, etc.). A lot of them maintain their patterns with very little fluctuation from baseline even under extended periods of altered or completely absent light cues, or erratic sleep patterns, which indicate that they are governed primarily by internal genetic factors, not external environmental ones. There is of course some variety between individuals, but it all averages out to a cycle just a bit over 24h in length [Stability, Precision, and Near-24-Hour Period of the Human Circadian Pacemaker; Czeisler et al. 1999 → a very summarized overview in this article.]

Now sleep, specifically, can vary a lot more, especially when there are no external signals (called “zeitgeber”, German for “time giver” or “synchronizer”) providing any hints as to time of day. During some “free-running” experiments, where there is a complete lack of zeitgeber and the study participants are left to sleep and wake as they feel like it, sleep patterns would drift gradually forward by around an hour each day, and the subjects’ “days” lengthen toward a period of 25-26 hours, which later studies revealed was due to the influence of artificial lighting [Entrainment of the Human Circadian System by Light; Jeanne F. Duffy and Kenneth P. Wright, Jr.] A study in 1973 by Mills, Minors and Waterhouse had subjects who adopted “days” spanning from 24 to 30 hours, though this study was relatively short, lasting not even two weeks total, so who knows if the patterns would have changed more over a longer timespan.

All the way back in 1938, Nathaniel Kleitman and Bruce Richardson spent just over a month in Mammoth Cave, isolated from the normal light and temperature zeitgeber, with the goal of seeing if they could shift to a 28-hour “day”. Richardson did adapt to it; Kleitman struggled. In 1965, spelunkers Josie Laures and Antoine Senni spent 88 and 126 days, respectively, in caves in the French Alps for a similar experiment, though theirs were free-running instead of strictly regimented. There was a lot more variation in the lengths of their “days”, with extremely erratic sleep cycles. A similar experiment was carried out in 2021, with fifteen participants and lasting forty days (I have not found any research papers related to it, but it was pretty recent and there might just not be that much published yet).

Here’s another paper talking about studies in chronobiology that has more links to other research papers in it that I wanted to include but couldn’t find a good in-line place to put it. Reading up on sleep disorders like delayed sleep phase disorder, advanced sleep phase disorder, and non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder might help with brainstorming too, since they all deal with sleep patterns that don’t fully mesh with the planet’s day-night cycle.

Maybe your characters adapted within a few generations, or considerably more than a few generations. Maybe there are some family lines that never adapt and others that manage it really quickly. Since they have the tech to migrate to a whole other planet, they presumably have artificial lighting, so perhaps they adapt the environment to themselves instead of the other way around, and maintain a semi-artificial “day”. Or everybody gradually time-shifts their way through all the days, going to sleep later and later until they loop back around, or their society splits into the night-owls and the early-birds as people settle into the rhythms that best fit their own natural tendencies and their new society is structured around that.

Tex is right in saying it’ll ultimately be up to you to decide how you want things to unfold in your story. The sample sizes and time spans of the experiments that have been carried out so far are not large, so really the only way we’d ever know for sure how any species would adapt to a planet with a day almost twice as long as they’re used to is to actually go out and settle such a world and see what happens, and we are quite a ways off from being able to do that. It might be more to think about when building your own world, but also opens up narrative flexibility since you can go with whichever options best support the story you want to tell.

[paperboy-pb]

"A Very Special Day" [Life Story]

[TW for: ableism against kids, internalized ableism, and mentions of suicidal ideation.]

9 years ago today, in the state of New York on September 5th, was my second day of 6th grade. Being a Special Ed kid, I was upset; my school, a K-8 that I had been with since the start and stayed with until the end, had always treated us so differently. And the world around me had promised that things would change once middle school began. But they hadn't. In fact, barely anything was new at all.

Same old baby talk from adults who saw me every day, but willfully ignored how big I had grown.

Same old bullying from my peers, disabled children who spent their days as pots calling kettles black, because no one had any intentions of teaching us better.

Same Adapted Phys Ed, getting ready to interrupt my morning reading every Monday, Wednesday, Friday; even though they'd promised to let me play in Gym with the rest of my class years ago by now.

Same old kids from the neighborhood filling up the rest of my grade, coming in smiling and laughing and oh so free in their new groups of 30. 30-something of them. 12 of us.

They'd even gotten some new kids from the K-5s around town. All of which seemed really nice. Man. Lucky them. Meanwhile, everything was so same-y that I'd considered running away from the school bus when it pulled up.

September 5th, 2014. Still kinda hot in Brooklyn. Sunny out there.

The day had gone bad. My classmates were talking FNAF, and being mean about things I don't remember. They flicked food at me during lunch while I tried to read and mind my own business. We weren't allowed to change seats, even though the rest of our grade got that privilege. It was supposed to be for all of us middle schoolers, but when I'd asked the day before, our lunch aide had no idea what I was on about. She suddenly insisted it was never a thing! While the rest of our grade was splitting into cliques behind her back, paying us no mind, knowing they'd somehow earned it and we didn't.

10-year-old me couldn't wait to go home.

By the end of the day, I was drained like no other. Head down on the desk and all. I was thinking, 2:20-something. Just a few more minutes.

God, why are things like this? Is it gonna get better later this year? I hope so, it's only the second day. Maybe it just starts bad!

Man, I miss summer already. I wish I spent today home all day eating onion ring chips again and playing Animal Crossi--

"Alright guys, listen up!" Said Mrs. Z, who would pretty much be our only teacher this year. (Meanwhile, everyone else got to have different people for different subjects.)

I don't remember her exact words. But she held up a white booklet with a bunch of kids holding hands and awkwardly smiling at us from the mostly-white cover. She said something about it being very important. And she ended her little stanza with, and I quote, "DON'T read these, alright? It's for your parents."

I think that one line changed the trajectory of my life.

As our para handed them out, my bookworm ass couldn't help but furrow my little brows. I'd had teachers assume certain books were "too hard" for me when they weren't, and get upset at me whenever I summarized the plot of them correctly. I'd had teachers tell me not to read other books during class, which was fair enough, I guess. But a teacher telling me not to read something at ALL?

Now THAT'S a new one...

It felt plasticy, not like paper. It's a packet, not a book. Six kids in a row, but none look like me, as usual. The cover said, "Family Guide To Special Education Services for School-Age Children. A Shared Path to Success." ...I don't think a title should be that long. Why not parentheses that end bit?

After that, we were dismissed. Me & some peers headed into the hallway down to the first floor to wait for our bus, and we chatted about it a little bit?

One was like, "Is this a report card or something?"

Another was like, "I guess?"

The first boy skimmed it, though, and saw nothing about him. Which eased his nerves.

A third asked me what I thought it was since I was the only kid who'd hit a Z-reading level. They figured I could make sense of it. And my first thought was boring adult stuff, or some sort of... after-school? Program? Thing? But I didn't really answer. I was too preoccupied with what Mrs. Z said.

What kind of teacher tells me not to read something? Give it to my parents is one thing, but specifically, "don't" read this? Dude! What doesn't she want me to see?

Everyone else had tossed the damn thing into their bookbags and zipped 'em up by now. We headed downstairs, and I couldn't help but notice that our 6th grade class was on the third floor; with a lot of grades 2-4 around us.

Meanwhile, the rest of the big middle school classes came down from higher up. It turns out that they all had their classes high up on the top floor. A bunch of bright minds floated down from above like they were that summer's fireflies, and we were the tips of night grass. Or maybe even worms, burrowing into the dirt and calling it a day.

...

By the time the bus was moving, I still had the packet in my hands. I was wondering why they all got to be up there and we didn't. We lived pretty close to Coney Island, after all: it must be cool seeing the parachute jump from the hallway window on your way down every day.

I barely had time to stuff the packet in my hands once we pulled up to my apartment.

If you've ever wondered what Kid Jonah was like, imagine some sort of hybrid between a miserable little nerd & the most optimistic goody-goody you've ever met. Like, yeah, I'd been in a few fights by this point, broken some rules behind their backs, but I was also... 10. And known for being "THE good kid" in front of teachers. I didn't like to defy them, you know? Even if they did always make me feel weird, or on-edge, or like I was a part of something bad.

So when I made a beeline for my room, I was like, Oh my God, I'm actually gonna do this...? And I didn't tell my parents a thing. I've kept the packet all this time and they STILL haven't read it!

But I did. I think I hesitated, but I remember opening it on my bed.

"Welcome.

Dear families, we've come a long way since our special education reform initiative, A Shared Path to Success, was launched citywide in 2012... we've also been changing hearts and minds as our core belief- that special education is a service, and not a place- has taken hold in our schools...

Section 1... Children learn at different speeds and in different ways. Some children have physical and/or intellectual disabili..."

WHAT?!

...

It was a really dense packet for a kid. Long, boring, seemed endless. But I understood the words. Especially that D one. And at the time, 10-year-old me knew it was a bad one.

I'd crossed the point of no return by then. I kept reading. And I didn't dare skip a word. "Intervention," "Special," "Disability," "Meeting," "Evaluation," "Eligibility," "IEP,"-- Hey, I know that word! IEPs are the dense things stapled to my report cards!

I remember the anger flaring in my heart, out my nose, widening my eyes once I got to the Eligibility bit. I thought, and I quote, "THEY THINK WE'RE DISABLED?!" I don't think words can articulate how insulted little 10-year-old me was!

...I don't think I can articulate how sad that is now, either. How do you instill such heavy ableism into a little boy like that? How do you live with yourself?

But I couldn't throw the book at the wall or take one of my mom's lighters to it like I initially wanted. Because I realized pretty quickly... Oh my God. This is it. These are THE ANSWERS! THIS IS WHY IT'S ALL HAPPENING!

I couldn't believe my eyes as I took it all in. The 13 disabilities that landed me and my friends in this mess, some of which matched up with certain kids I knew right away. But what really caught my attention were the services. Terms that I KNEW about. Things I engaged with. Things I... hated.

"Occupational Therapy." That nice older lady who takes me out of class every few days so I can play memory games, or play with this hand-gripper, or yank pegs outta this bright green putty.

"Paraprofessional Services"; those weird second-teachers that annoy us and only us, but never anyone else in the other classes. They're so stuck-up sometimes! And they never really seem to know how to leave us alone. Especially certain kids.

The stories I could tell about them all now... good fucking lord.

Physical Therapy; That's the one where the lady is always making me feel bad about things and do sit-ups or run drills in the hallway and stairwell... and do embarrassing stretches like people aren't walking by.

And she got upset with me because I brought a lunchbox every day for years; she told me, "You'll never be a big kid if you keep bringing food from home, Jonah!"

And I told her, "But my mom doesn't even make the sandwiches anymore! I make them for myself!"

And she was like, "But still!"

She also measures her footstep, saying it was a foot of distance. Like, 12 inches. But nuh-uh, it was never a foot! Her sneakers aren't that big. Rulers are longer. Why didn't she just get a measuring tape? What's this lady's problem?

The one that sunk my heart, though, was Adapted Phys Ed. The packet said it was "A specially designed program of developmental activities, games, sports, and rhythms suited to the interests, capabilities, and limitations of individual children who may now safely or successfully participate in the activities of a regular physical education program."

And I thought: ...That's the watered-down gym class I do three times a week.

The one where we do "challenges" like stepping into each hole of an agility ladder mat and doing a squat before moving to the next.

The one where we never play sports like everybody else gets to do.

The one that makes the gym teacher sit me out on the bleachers by myself, and watch literally everybody else I know have fun. And when I ask why, nobody tells me anything.

The one where I ask how I can improve in order to go play with everybody else, but nobody tells me anything.

The one where Mrs. D keeps promising me that I'll get to play with the rest of my class soon... but it never comes true.

This is why everybody acts so weird around us.

This is why we can't even talk to the rest of our grade.

This is why nothing ever changes...!

It all made sense. 10-year-old me couldn't feel the floor or the bed anymore. The back of my mind buzzed like shaken soda, fizzling against the back of my skull. I didn't cry. I didn't have tears. But I did sink down, down into the depths of I-don't-even-know-where.

I went time-traveling back to May of last school year, where a Special Ed kid the grade above me was saying to his classmate, "We're all just the kids nobody wants." But I didn't have context. Was this the context? He sounded like he was about to cry.

I went back to 4th grade when I headed into the bathroom and saw two kids from my grade walk by with papers promoting the talent show to everybody. I saw the text written on them clear as day! And I got excited; Our school's having a talent show? COOL! We must be getting those later today, too!

The papers never came.

I went back to 3rd grade, where paras would hover over our class during lunch, but nobody else's. They always stood tall above and between us, like they were a scarecrow keeping the birds of our grade away.

And there was so much. More. Than that.

...

I still wonder why Z didn't want me seeing that. Maybe she knew I would spiral or label myself. But at the same time... that's a learned behavior. Ableism is a hatred, and hatred is learned. From ADULTS. One that she and the rest of the school could at least try to curb if she noticed.

Z wasn't a bad lady. I think she was trying to protect me? But... we already knew we were being treated unfairly. Why would keeping this secret protect me?

The anger only lasted a little while. Because something else dawned on me.

I can't stay here.

This place had been upsetting me for YEARS. And now I knew that it was happening for a reason. A shitty one, but still... a reason. It's not just bad luck. And that it wasn't going to change unless I removed that reason from their minds.

I had to leave. Sound familiar?

The next day we had school? I was completely shaken up. Kinda surprised no one noticed. I was finally seeing just how deep this all went. The teachers smiling in my face, baby-talking, getting reallll close while having this sense of disgust in their eyes.

The staggering difference in numbers between "normal" classes and ours.

Our class locations.

I even found this board on the first floor that had a picture of every teacher and what they taught. Sure enough, "Special Education" was specified in the label for every teacher I'd ever had. I was even able to find the next teachers I'd have for Grades 7 & 8. And my blood went cold because I knew those two particular ladies were pretty mean.

My school was DEFINITELY failing that, "Special Ed is a service, not a place!" shit the state allegedly wanted to accomplish. It was a place. And I... was trapped.

And I couldn't stay trapped. Because as far as I knew, education was everything. I was a very academic little boy back then. And I didn't know what staying in a place like this could mean for my education later down the line.

I didn't want to find out.

I also didn't want my social life restricted like this. Especially since there weren't many kids who treated me well. I wanted freedom. I wanted independence. I wanted a chance to actually find real friends!

And this is sad, but... I was already very depressed by that age. Due to the nature of Special Ed at school. Had been since 8. And so... I made a plan in my bedroom the same night I found the packet:

I can't carry this environment with me into high school. I have to do anything-- EVERYTHING I can to get outta here by the time 8th grade starts! And if I fail... I can't finish 8th grade like that.

The Verrazzano Bridge and the walkway by the water, the one with the short fence that I can get right over, are only a fifteen minute walk from home. If I don't get out of Special Ed by 8th grade, then... I have to go out there and throw myself off. I have to kill myself. I have to...! Because I know for a fact I just can't. Stay. Here.

And I was serious. Dead-serious. Because I thought about it every day for the next 2 years straight.

...

That packet started it all for PB. And as sad as it is that I technically had to go behind adults' backs just to learn something about myself and where I was, I'm extremely glad it happened. Because it's also what kickstarted my interest in disability topics. My journey in learning who we were, what we were, and what we do & don't deserve.

It led to the first drafts of PB just under a year later, which set my life on a completely new path. Paperboy would not EXIST if it weren't for that day. Hell; I don't even know if my OTHER projects (like Weirder Than Usual) would, either!

That wasn't right. None of that was right. But it did give me a story to tell. One that you guys are finally starting to see!

And one that I'm very, very proud of.

Disability conversations are extremely important to me now. I don't think I'm the beacon of anti-ableism or anything like that. I know I've fucked up as I grew up, especially in my younger years. But this entire situation showed me how hush-hush the world likes to be about it. And while it's better now than it was in 2014, it ain't great yet.

And I think I owe it to 10-year-old Jonah to change that shit. Because when he googled "Special Ed makes me feel bad," he barely found anything.

It was definitely an experience I will never forget. And as you saw above, I still keep that packet with me to this day, and I always will, because of just how heavily it changed my life.

I have no idea where or who I'd be if it wasn't for that.

Happy 9th birthday, SpEd packet. Can't wait for the 10th!

[bourbon-ontherocks]

I was tagged by @sothischickshe (thank you hon!! How are you? ❤🥰😘) to post 9 of my fave film first watches of 2023, and like...

Well first thing is, I'm properly incapable of telling when I watched stuff, like I discovered yesterday with utter shock that Joe Biden wasn't elected two years ago, so y'know what even is time etc, I don't know fucking shit about what I watched in 2023, 2022, etc.

Second thing is, I tend to watch more shows than movies in a general way, although I did watch quite an unusual amount of movies lately (lately as in "Somewhere between now and I wanna say 2022"), but mostly because of a certain actress I do despise now and honestly most of these movies weren't great anyway.

My point is that I don't know what to list haha, but I guess there are still a few ideas coming to mind:

Bonne conduite (2023). Saw this one in the theater, was already sold on it based on the cast, had a wonderful time.

Intouchables (2011). Not as cheesy and boring as I thought it would be.

Elle l'adore (2014). Fairly enjoyable, but mostly I watched this at a time when it was particularly resonant with my own state of mind.

The room (2003). Hi-la-rious.

Illusions perdues (2021). Randomly and unintendedly stumbled upon it on tv and really enjoyed the first two hours (then I had to go to bed but I'm definitely planning on catching up with the ending).

Sentinelle (2023). Just like I predicted it would be. Jonathan Cohen jonathancohen-ing around. Not that I'd complain though.

Tagging if u wanna play @humanbra @ficuscircus @hemerae-ramblings @pia-writes-things @sdktrs12 @asteraceae-blue @earanie @jmeclatejerome @luluonthemoon

[p-redux]

Do you know how or when caitriona met her husband? I’m so fascinated by them and you seem to know a lot about her.

Hi Anon, yes, I know the whole story via my previous Tony family source. I've answered this question MANY times, but I don't mind answering it again. But since I've answered it so many times, I'm just going to direct you to a previous post where I talk about most of my past insider sources. And I'll also copy and paste the specific parts related to Cait and Tony and their backstory. Let me know if you have any questions.

Happy reading! 👇

And here's the insider source info specifically related to Caitriona Balfe and Tony McGill. 👇 ( This is an excerpt from my previous Insider Sources post).

---------------👇

My second major source was my Tony family source. My Tony source is someone from Glasgow who was friends with someone I’d known for a while. My friend put me in contact with her. The Tony source approached me to tell me that she was shocked to find out a relative of hers (later found out it was her brother) had revealed “the lead actress from that new show Outlander is dating Tony McGill.” She was shocked because she and her family have known Tony and his family for years, all of them growing up in and around Glasgow. Her brother went to school with Tony and his brother, Joe. She then told me the whole backstory of Cait and Tony. She wanted me to keep the info to myself, and she had no motivation or intention of making it public. But she finally agreed, after I gave my word that I would protect her identity and I have. 

What she shared with me in late 2014 is that her brother found out their friend, Tony was dating Caitriona Balfe. At the time she said they’d been dating for about 9-10 months, that’s why I always put the start of their relationship around March 2014. She was told that by December 2014, the relationship was “dead serious” between them, and that Cait had spent Christmas 2014 in London with Tony and his dad. And then Tony had flown to Ireland with Cait to spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s with her family and friends (we’ve all seen the pic and video on Donal Brophy’s IG). My source said that Cait and Tony had been friends for 9 years or so at the time (again, this was told to me in 2014) and had met years ago when Tony rented out a room to one of Cait’s friends. They hooked up briefly back then and then remained friends, until it turned romantic again around March 2014. The source said that she and her family knew Tony and his family from back in the day, and she told me what school Tony went to in Glasgow (something I haven’t and won’t make public). She said that Tony had moved from Glasgow years ago and had been living in London for a while (again, this was told to me in 2014). Also, that he and his brother owned a bar/live music place in London, The Library in Islington (they later opened a second one, The Reading Room, which Cait posted from on IG) and a music production company. And that prior to that, Tony was the band manager for some Scottish bands, most notable, The Fratellis. She described Tony as “fun, clever, and hysterically funny.” 

The Tony source came into the picture after I had my Twitter account up, where I was posting insider info given by my first source. I had already posted that Sam and Cait weren’t dating. This second source is the one that filled in the missing puzzle piece I didn’t know was missing and told me she knew WHO Cait was dating. I would have NEVER known the name Tony McGill associated with Cait if not for this source. He was on no one’s radar. And he wasn’t on social media. This source told me details only an insider would know. And I also had her full identity, so I knew she was legit as well. Then ‘lo and behold Tony started showing up places with Cait. There is NO way I would have known about Tony without this inside family source. No way. Of course after my source told me about him, I did look him up online and there was hardly any information about him. Never in a million years would I have linked Tony McGill with Cait on my own. And I mentioned Tony McGill way before he started showing up places with Cait. How could it be that I said sources told me Tony McGill is dating Cait, and then a man identified as Tony McGill is seen out and about with Cait? The only way I knew about Tony is because the source told me. 

Back in the day, when Cait and Tony weren’t yet living together yet, people wondered how they made their relationship work given the sometimes long distances? Well, when they first started dating around March 2014, Cait was filming Outlander Season 1, so Tony would go to Glasgow or Cait would go to London on weekends. Then when Season 1 wrapped and Cait went back to L.A. (where she had been living) in late Sept. 2014, Tony went to L.A. to visit her in October 2014 (both their birthdays are in October, Cait Oct. 4 and Tony Oct. 12, Libra/Libra bond!). The Fratellis were also in L.A. Oct. 2014 and Tony helped them out with some business stuff. Then, as I’ve already stated, Cait and Tony spent time together Dec. 2014 and January 2015 for the holidays. Then Valentine’s Feb. 2015, Cait flew to London for the opening of Tony’s 2nd bar, The Reading Room. She posted a pic on IG. Then in April 2015, Tony flew to NY to join Cait for the premiere of the second half of Season 1. Eyewitness sources saw him sitting with Cait’s friends at the screening and then with Cait and her friends inside the after party. There was one PUBLIC pic on Twitter of Cait, Tony and Sam. And I and others have been shown private pics of Tony there. Many of us have seen them but we couldn’t make them public because they show the location where they were taken, thus identifying the source who took them, and she would get in trouble with her boss. After that, in May 2015, Cait went back to Glasgow to begin shooting OL Season 2, and this time, she brought her cat, Eddie with her. Per more than one source, Tony pretty much lived in Glasgow after that with Cait. One person who went to Tony’s bars in Glasgow and then reached out to me, said that she had asked about Tony and was told “he doesn’t come around much anymore because he moved back to Scotland.” They then moved into their new place in Glasgow, moved out of that one and they moved to a new place in Glasgow, and also have a place in London. Some say they also bought a place in the English countryside. And they are obviously now married (since 2019) and they had their first son. THAT’s how Tony and Cait made it work.

My Tony source also parted ways with me, also due to fear of being found out. She didn’t formally break up with me, the way the original industry source did, she simply ghosted me. But I also see her pop up on Twitter or IG sometimes and get all wistful. Oh well...

-------------

So, Anon, that's the Tony and Cait backstory straight from someone who knows Tony and his family. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for stopping by! ❤️

[wot-notes]

WoT Notes is on the Wheel of Time Resource List

Recently I had the shocking surprise to find these two links on Reddit where somebody has made a list with helpful links and resources for super WoT fans who would love to dive deeper into the lore with more content. Huge thanks to JaimTorfinn for putting this blog into the special list!

Help required!

Wheel of Time Resource List

It is great honor WoT Notes to sit beside all the WoT places that I’ve been looking up to since my first days around the fandom - Encyclopaedia WoT, TheoryLand Interview Database, The 13th Depository, Steven Cooper’s WoT Timeline or The WoT FAQ. When I started this project 7 (9) years ago I couldn’t dream for the blog to be in one sentence with these titans. I am not worthy and certainly I do not think I have done anything close to the huge inspiration these sites provided for thousands of WoT fans.

But it is still an honor. It is also baffling to think about how this blog doesn’t have alternative after so many years of people visiting the library. I started the project with the idea that it would be temporary. I have no access to RJ’s notes after all and I depend on what other fans share publicly. For the last 9 years I hoped that the others will decide to give us full access to what they collected on their visits. Especially Terez and Matt Hatch who already run the TheoryLand Interview Database and who could know how important is this information to be gathered. But I am surprised to say that even to these days information of the notes is still not easily available for fans. For example Matt Hatch still put some notes only in his videos and never released them in textual form.

This project shouldn’t have to exist and yet it is the only place where you can find (most of the shared in public) the notes gathered in one place. Truly wild thought.

May be someday I will have the chance to visit the notes myself.

I hope you really enjoy your time with the notes devouring for more WoT content.

The notes are great insight in the mind of great man and author.

Let the Light keep you safe.

LightOne

P.S. WoT-Notes was created 7 years ago in 2016 but the first share of the RJ’s notes is in 2014 in my main blog WoT-Tidbits.

[mistressheroine]

author interview

Thank you for the tags @gneebee & @im-immortal

Happy New Year everyone!

1. how many works do you have on AO3?

6

2. what's your total AO3 word count?

43,408

3. what fandoms do you write for?

The Walking Dead - Beth Greene/Daryl Dixon

4. what are your top five fics by kudos?

Keep Me

A Stolen Moment

La Dame Blanche

I'll Be Home For Christmas

Something

5. do you respond to comments?

Yes, and I try my best to respond to every comment I get. I massively appreciate all the support and feedback I get so I try my best to acknowledge that.

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Something was definitely the angstiest thing I've written so far, although I do have a second part for La Dame Blanche in my notes that would probably beat it...

7. what's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I Want Your Midnights probably 😉

8. do you get hate on fics?

No, thankfully I haven't had any hate directed my way since I started posting earlier this year but I know it happens.

9. do you write smut? if so, what kind?

I want Your Midnights was my first attempt at writing smut and I gotta say I'm so proud of how it turned out. Writing smut always made me really nervous but once I got started it was actually so much fun and it's defintely something I plan to do again.

10. do you write crossovers? what's the craziest one you've written?

No, and I don't have any plans to.

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I'm aware of.

12. have you ever had a fic translated?

No.

13. have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, although it sounds like it coulld be fun!

14. what's your all-time favourite ship?

Beth & Daryl - I am literally never getting over them.

15. what's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I have a lot of ideas jotted down, snippets of fic ideas or scenes rather than stuff in my WIPs. I do intend to get around to them all eventually. I did have a whole Beth Lives idea that I came up with a while ago about her going back to the farm but I think it's more likely that the idea is going to get incorporated into Keep Me at some point rather than it growing into it's own story.

16. what are your writing strengths?

Oh wow, I don't know. I'm not very good at critquing myself. Hopefully keeping them as much in character as I can?

17. what are your writing weaknesses?

Right now I feel like action sequences (I'm trying to write some action sequences for the latest chapter of Keep Me) - creating the right vibe for them and building the suspense. I also think sometimes I'm in danger of repeating the same words a lot when describing something. Having the confidence to trust myself once I've written something out as well, I do look to @im-immortal for a lot of reassurance and I massive appreciate her taking the time to read the stuff I send to her 😊

18. thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I did a bit of this in La Dame Blanche but I don't think I'd ever be confident enough to use more than a few words at a time. Google translate is notroious for messing stuff up and I wouldn't want to do it if I wasn't confident that I was getting it right.

19. first fandom you wrote for?

Alias on FF.net - I post one very short fic there once and then Something was originally posted over there back in 2014 but I didn't write anything from then until earlier on this year.

20. favourite fic you've written?

Keep Me has my heart right now because it's the biggest thing I've ever attempted, but writing I Want Your Midnights was so much fun and really made me feel more confident as a writer.

A lot of you have been tagged already so sorry if I'm tagging you again but anyone who wants to join in please do! @burningupasun @boltthrutheheart @sasusc @fairybellworld

[yuzukahibiscus]

【Performance Review】Flower Troupe “MAYERLING” “ENCHANTEMENT －A Luxurious Perfume－”

A royal love romance that Takarazuka Revue is proud of, Yuzuka Rei creates an ultimate aesthetic for the tragic Crown Prince

(This article was taken from Ronza, which you can find the original article here. This is the free coverage of the whole review.)

Flower Troupe performance Musical Romance “MAYERLING” “ENCHANTEMENT – A Luxurious Perfume –” opens its first day (Shonichi) in the Takarazuka Grand Theatre on January 1st.

The stage performance “MAYERLING” is set in 19th century Austria, describing the poignant love story between Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Mary. It has been performed several times since its premiere in 1983 and is now proudly a representative performance in Takarazuka Revue. This is both the 40th anniversary since the premiere and performed again in the stage of Takarazuka Grand Theatre after 30 years, adding in new direction that follows current modernity.

The one playing the tragic Crown Prince Rudolf is of course Flower Troupe Top Star Yuzuka Rei-san. Beyond the solemn image of the pure white military outfit, she creates an aesthetic world with her expressions full of despair. Together with Hoshikaze Madoka-san who plays as Mary, you have the beautiful and compatible Top Combi. This ephemeral, beautiful, ultimate love romance opens 2023 for Takarazuka Revue glamorously. (Spoilers below.)

Yuzuka’s beauty in the tragic prince

When we talk about “MAYERLING”, the first we remember is the opening scene, right. Symmetrical to the crimson red grand staircase are Rudolf and Mary standing and just from that alone, Takarazuka fans can’t hold their enthusiasm anymore. Then comes the dramatic introduction of Rudolf and Mary’s lines, which is definitely the signature of this production. That moved feeling when the curtain opens up as the beautiful melody plays, is unchanging in any era.

–– January 26 1889, the German embassy in Vienna. In the ball where the royal family attended, happily dancing are Crown Prince Rudolf (Yuzuka) and baroness Mary Vestera (Hoshikaze). But both of them already secretly made decisions in their heart. Going back in time 9 months ago. Heralded as the next emperor, Rudolf was burdened with affairs and conventions, having a cold relationship with his wife Stephanie (Haruhi Urara) and living the stifling days. On the other hand, (Rudolf) praises the lives his cousin Johann (Minami Maito) and his lover Millie (Hoshizora Misaki) lead, despite (Johann) being a member of the Habsburgs. One day, Rudolf met Mary in the celebration of Burgtheatre. Since he also wants to live a life like Johann... He couldn’t stop thinking about it and he was strongly interested by the girl ––

The prologue continues with a Vienna Waltz, a graceful one. The beautiful musumeyaku and the princes, whom look like they came out from mangas, danced ballet and right from there, the atmosphere is dreamy.

In that kind of world view, Rudolf who appears in that Viennese ball is especially beautiful. Her sadness concealed in her gaze and her flawless and smart actions made me realise again that this is the charm of Takarazuka otokoyaku which cannot be found elsewhere.

Responsible for the next era of Europe is successor Rudolf, who doesn’t have a day of rest in heart. The feud with his father, the relationship with his mother, his childhood education... You could see that invisible heavy pressure, and that loneliness clouded on Yuzuka-san’s Rudolf and by seeing that alone makes me heart wrenched. It is eerily fascinating to see how fitting it is for this prince chained in this decadent and aesthetic world, to have a horrifying skull and pistol on his table. Above all, when he couldn’t meet Mary, his sexy aura is exquisite as he rumages his military outfit in the bar. This process enhances persuasion as we see how Rudolf is forced into where he was.

Yuzuka-san has already played Rudolf in 2014 Flower Troupe performance “ELISABETH”. Even though she was also amazing then, this depth accumulated over the year adds onto a new layer of charm. I can experience yet a different depth of emotions.

【公演評】花組「梅耶林」「ENCHANTEMENT －華麗的香水－」

寶塚歌劇團引以為豪的皇室愛情羅曼史，柚香光為悲情的皇太子打造極致審美

（本文摘自論座，您可以在此處找到原文章。這是整個評論的免料部分。）

1月1日，花組公演浪漫音樂劇「梅耶林」「ENCHANTEMENT – 華麗的香水 –」初日在寶塚大劇場開幕。

舞台劇「梅耶林」以19世紀的奧地利為背景，描述了魯道夫皇太子與瑪麗男爵夫人之間淒美的愛情故事。 自1983年首演以來已多次公演，現已成為寶塚歌劇團的代表公演。 這既是首演40週年，也是時隔30年再次登上寶塚大劇場的舞台，增添了符合現代性的新執導方向。

扮演悲慘的皇太子魯道夫的，當然是花組的TOP STAR柚香光了。 在純白軍裝的莊嚴形象之外，她充滿絕望的表情營造了一個唯美的世界。 與扮演瑪麗的星風まどか一起，就是美麗且兼容的TOP控比。 2023 年，寶塚歌劇團以這種短暫、美麗、終極的愛情羅曼史開場。（以下劇透。）

悲劇的王子，柚香的美

說起「梅耶林」，我們最先想到的應該是開場吧。站在赤紅色大階段與之對稱的是魯道夫和瑪麗。光看這一點，寶塚的粉絲們就再也按捺不住了。然後是戲劇性的序幕，魯道夫和瑪麗說出台詞，絕對是這部作品的標誌。伴隨著優美的旋律拉開帷幕的那種感動，在任何時代都不會改變。

——1889年1月26日，德國駐維也納大使館。 在王室一家都出席的舞會上，皇太子魯道夫（柚香）和男爵夫人瑪麗維斯特拉（星風）歡快地跳舞。 但兩人心裡都已經暗自做了決定。 在9個月前，被譽為下任皇帝的魯道夫身負繁重的事務和慣例，與妻子斯蒂芬妮（春妃うらら）關係冷淡，過著令人窒息的日子。 另一方面，儘管（約翰）是哈布斯堡王朝的成員，（魯道夫）讚揚他的堂兄約翰（水美舞斗）和他的情人米莉（星空美咲）的生活。 一天，魯道夫在城堡劇院的慶典上與瑪麗相遇。 因為他也想過著約翰那樣的生活⋯他不禁想到這裡，對這個女孩產生了濃厚的興趣——

序幕以優美的維也納華爾茲繼續。 美麗的娘役們和彷彿從漫畫中走出來的王子們跳著芭蕾舞，一開始就營造出夢幻般的氛圍。

在那樣的世界觀裡，在那個維也納舞會上出現的魯道夫格外美麗。 她那眼神中隱藏的憂傷，那完美無瑕的動作，讓我再次體會到，這就是寶塚男役的魅力，在別處是找不到的。

本身應承擔下一個歐洲時代的是繼任者魯道夫，他心中沒有一天可以休息。 與父親的不和，與母親的關係，從小的教育⋯可以看到籠罩在柚香桑魯道夫身上那無形的沉重壓力和孤獨感，光是看到這些就讓人心痛。 看到這位被困在這個頹廢又淒美世界中的王子，桌子上放著可怕的頭骨和手槍竟然是多麼合適，是不可思議的感覺。最重要的是，在無法見到瑪麗艾的情況下，他在酒場弄亂了軍裝，散發著性感的氣質是極致的。當我們看到魯道夫是如何被逼迫時，這種過程增強了說服力。

柚香桑已經在2014年花組公演「ELISABETH」中飾演魯道夫。 儘管她當時也很了不起，但多年積累的這種深度，又增添了一層新的魅力，體驗到不同深度的情感。

[i-have-one-braincell]

As someone who hasn't read the Iron Fist comics, at what age is Danny supposed to return? In the show, they're teenagers around 15/16 so if he got another year then 17/18, right? But we've already established that the show's writing can be iffy so I'm curious to know from the official source.

I think there was a Netflix show about him but I'm not a huge fan of real person productions made on comics/books.

Do you have suggestions on where to start reading about Iron fist and the other heroes? I've heard Batman had gone through different writers with different takes - some that are even contradictive of each other - and I don't like it when that happens. And Spider-man? I've been told that the newest aren't as good as the older issues; something about not staying true to his character.

Oooff don’t watch the live action Iron Fist show. I’m begging you.

In the comics, Danny entered K’un L’un when he was 9 years old and won the Iron Fist when he was 19. He was given the offer to eat a plant that would make him immortal and to continue residing in K’un L’un as their weapon but Danny declined and left the city when the next opening have opened to return to New York for revenge. So he returned to New York at age 19.

From the show, I believe he entered K’un L’un when he was about 5 or 6 and left when he was 16 or so.

I recommend reading the Ultimate Spider-Man comics when starting on reading about Peter. He was very well-written in the comics and was an asshole (my fav gender) and we also got Iron Fist in it too but he’s an adult and a daddy and appeared for about 5 issues or so.

For Danny, I say reading the 2014 Iron Fist: The Living Weapon since it’s a more edgy and angsty take on the character and is pretty badass. 2016 Power Man and Iron Fist is a really wholesome comic series of Danny and Luke getting back together again after stopping Heroes For Hire now that Luke is a family man. Both of them are pretty goofy and quite the opposite of how they’re protrayed in the usm.

For Ava, she appears in the Avengers Academy comics but we don’t much of her and doesn’t appear until in the middle of the comic. She is put more on focus in the Mighty Avengers about her control of the amulet and seeking revenge (and also works with Luke Cage and Danny).

Sam would be in his 2013 Nova comics. He’s given more depth and character in his comics than in the show and is not much of an asshole in the comics😭😭.

I’m not entirely big on comics but those are the comics that I read to understand the characters more when writing my Call You Mine fic. I’m not a big fan of the current Spider-Man comics in the main 616 universe since Peter would be written so badly and kept torturing my man😭😭 (I mean I do too but there’s a limit💀). As you said, there’s many writers who writes a single character and would have very different views on the character of how they’re supposed to behave, they can’t stay consistent which is the biggest flaw in current Spider-Man.

Ps. Surprisingly the usm show have their own comic issues as well that I discovered like 2 years ago💀😭. It gives a bit more personality in the characters and Danny is a bit of a doofus in those comics (a good doofus🤭). Its called the 2015 Ultimate Spider-Man (Infinite Comics) if yall want to check it out.

[i-dream-of-twilight-sparkle]

Hey everyone! I don’t have a large post besides this as much as I’d like to since both Geniequestria and Earnest Empathetic Change are already big projects on their own. But thought I’d commemorate today’s date for 10 years ago today I Dream of Twilight Sparke/Ask Genie Twilight began! I’ve had a wonderful time hosting all the genie pony stuff I’ve done in the past 10 years and wanted to give a good look back. 

2012 was the humble beginning back when the blog was mostly just another of the “What if [insert character] was an X” which was pretty common at that time. But as you can see, definitely expanded since then into it’s full alternate universe with additional lore to fill in some holes that the original show never filled. The origin story that started just a month after the blog’s beginning actually proved to be pretty core to later stories and direction the blog went in.

2013 was where I began to get my feet wet in the community working with other blogs and meeting new friends. Navitas and I working together on a crossover (And some crossovers entirely done by me, and approved by him later) between my Genie Twilight and his own along with a genie Trixie. I still have Navitas friended on Steam, but he seems to have definitely long retired from active art life. I miss having him around actively, but I won’t forget the memories I had with him originally. It’s too bad Twixie Genies isn’t archived on Tumblr. Though I believe most of it can still be found on Derpibooru anyway. There was also the Twibrary, though tbh it didn’t really get too far in what some of the others wanted to do. And around 9 years ago, was when I unveiled a direction that would stay even till’ now. With Twilight adopting Spike officially as her son. This was also of course the year of the much controversial Season 3

2014 mostly went into Season 4 back when Alicorn Twilight was new and the most controversial thing in the fandom heh. But Season 4 did end up being my favorite season of the show. And Twilight’s Kingdom still to this day is my favorite episode of the whole show

2015 had the bulk of Return to Saddle Arabia which was a precursor to the more story-oriented updates I would later have with SOTDT and onwards. It also gave Spike a permanent scar as to differentiate him from any other Spike along with the introduction of the Dragon Tear which would get further expanded on 5 years later. Season 5 also had a fair share of some of my favorite episode responses to do. Including an Ace Attorney spoof.

2016 was where I decided to want to expand to a few more genie stories other then Genie Twilight. So I created some alternate scenarios where it was Pinkie, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash that got genified instead of Twilight. And put them together on a sideblog for more Genie fun. This was also sort of a collar project with other people who did genie pony stuff. Although I’m the only one left still active on Tumblr as they all stopped for their own reasons it seems. This year also of course having Season 6, the season I still am sort of at best lukewarm towards it out of any of the seasons. Though there are some things I appreciate more now then I did back then.

2017, 2018, and 2019 largely were more about just waiting for the episode responses of the final 3 seasons. The ones where Twilight Velvet/Twilight’s Mom (For Season 7) and Scootaloo wished she could transform into a sea pony (For Season 8) at will still rank among some of my favorites and it’s why they’re featured for that year. Seapony Scootaloo even got factored into the future featured in EEC. Things dis get winding down near the end, as I even stopped doing episode responses for every episode if I had no idea how to respond. There’s still at least one or a few Season 8 episodes I never made a response for, and I think most of Season 9 I never have either (And for the most part probably never will. Not out of disdain for Season 9 or anything, in fact I think I found Season 9 largely ok and I was satisfied with the finale. But it was hard to have any real idea to respond to them for most episodes.)

2020’s a bit cheating since for most of the year I did nothing as a certain… pandemic, a stressful election, and everything that went on the year just couldn’t allow me to focus on even hobbies such as my ask blogs. I was too worried about if my family and/or myself were going to get terribly sick from the virus. Though once it was late in the year, things settled down enough for me to start perhaps the biggest story for the blog yet: Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear that was meant to be a culmination of the events of the 9 Seasons with both past and new lore filling in some of the holes the show left over for the IDOTS universe. The story still has a major impact to this day, as much of the focus has shifted onto Starlight Glimmer. Thanks to SOTDT, I really wanted to expand on her as much as I possibly can. Turning a character I was once very lukewarm about, into practically my muse for continuing not just IDOTS but the project that was started the very next year…

2021 also largely followed-up with many comics and mini-stories following after SOTDT (especially Pinkie Pear Pie and Starlight's Sisterly Simulation), but it was also largely beginning of what’s sure to be the largest genie pony project ever by the time it ends. Geniequestria, a blog that definitely ups the ante in terms of rating on either of my past genie blogs. Geniequestria is not meant for the same exact audience that IDOTS was for, it’s much more niche but so much more fun if like me you’re a fan of ponies and have had an interest in genies for years. Where as IDOTS is generally only one pony is a genie, and is meant to be more in line with the show’s tone (Though sometimes going to dark stories the show would never touch. But otherwise…). Could also be enjoyable if you ever were a fan of the Season 5 Starlight, having her become a powerful genie to really relish into her villainous side that while we certainly all remember, it didn't not really last that long in retrospect. It’s a project that I brainstormed heavily started with Creamsicle Delight, and have gotten wonderful help from both NovaSpark and TailMaker. And can’t wait to progress further and further for what I have in store for that blog.

2022 continued Geniequestria, but also the beginning of another big story (Though I’m not really sure it will be as big as SOTDT in the end. Though the way it’s structured it will take longer to get to the end then SOTDT did. Since I’m working on Geniequestria at the same time). Earnest Empathetic Change will have some stuff I’m looking forward to share with you guys as I get to each chapter. And I’ll thank NovaSpark once again for being a huge help with it. EEC may also be the final big story for IDOTS as when it’s over I’m not sure there will be much to really continue. I’m not saying EEC will be the finale of IDOTS. But, when it’s over it’s probably a fair warning that besides potentially new asks. Much of the production may focus on Geniequestria specifically as after EEC, the only other story that may come about. Is whatever I decide to do to end I Dream of Twilight Sparkle whenever that day comes. I hope I get to a day that I feel like I’ve truly finished IDOTS the way I want to. Though there is certainly some directions I still want to take it.

And with that, that’s my brief overview of this decade of Genie ponies. Thanks to everybody who’s followed, liked, replied, sent asks, etc. over the years and I’m glad I still have people around that are interested in my little circle of the internet. And as mentioned on the bottom, I’m not done yet. Even with IDOTS possibly almost done, there will be so much to do on Geniequestria. It’s very possible I won’t even be quite done with all I want to do Genie pony wise in 2025. Eventually it’ll all come to an end as all things do, but as long as I have a story I want to tell and life doesn’t get too much in the way. I’ll keep going! Thank you all ^^

[bethaven]

#6 How I met your mother

Plot: 52 year old Ted Mosby sits down with his kids to tell the story of how he met their mother. This takes them on a looong crazy journey through several ups and downs, relationships, break-ups, weddings, a blue french horn and beers at the bar. A story about finding the one, or realising there might be two...

Years: 2005-2014

Seasons: 9

My story: If you were a teen around 2005 this series was kind of hard to miss. I saw bits and pieces and afternoon reruns everywhere and it seemed like everyone talked about it. As the years went by the question about WHO the mother is grew even stronger and as social media grew bigger the theories flew around like memes in 2023. I guess you could say I didn't choose How I met your mother - How I met your mother choose me.

Teachable moments: This series is full of small wisdoms and bad hook-up-tips, but most of all it's hopelesly romantic. Love can be found anywhere, love sometimes last, sometimes it doesn't, but it always teaches you something. And, the concept of "the one" might not be that simple.

Best character: Robin is an unusual character for a sitcom and one of the few childfree ones we've seen. She's emotionaly complex and very relateable. I love that she shows us that there's a lot of hard choices in life, and you might not always make the right ones.

Best episode: "Slap bet" (S2E9). This is a classic How I met your mother episode, it has mystery, conspiracy theorys, slap bets, Americans' weird image of Canada and not the least - Robin Sparkles!

Best quote: "Never underestimate the power of destiny. Because when you least expect it, the littlest thing can cause a ripple effect that changes your life." (Ted Mosby)

Fun fact: Jim Parsons auditioned to play Barney Stinson at one point(!)

If you like this you might also like: The spinoff How I met your father was released last year, but was cancelled already after season 2 a few months ago. A very good try, but even with Hilary Duff and Kim Cattrall it'd never live up to the original. Others you might like are Scrubs, The good place, The big bang theory and New Girl.

[hinacu-arts]

Actually typing on my computer for once so I'm able to use the read more lol. I need you guys to tell me if you want this in

BBC - The Fic

which would either be as its own chapter or Casey reading it. Theres also the option of it becoming a short little companion story/fic, and im also considering writing a final battle deal but I'm not sure I want both in BBC. Here's the first part of it, I cant really write more until the actual fic is written unless I got more technical on the How Do We Solve This Problem line of convo.

Reminder that this is a group chat on all of 2012's phones, that's why their names are there. Debating on whether or not to change that. The first section is copy and pasted from the section that was in Chp 2. I tried to space it out like actual texting, but tumblr was fighting me so thats why there are random "."s in there

Key Donnie = in 1987 (the first TV show) Mikey = in 1990 (the first live action movies from 90,91, and 93) April = in 2003 (the second TV show) Leo = in 2007 (the CGI animated movie) Raph = in 2014 (the second live action movies from 2014 and 2016) Casey = in 2018 (rottmnt)

LEO: anyone copy?

.

APRIL: copy

.

RAPH: hallelujah. Get me out of this hell

.

LEO: not yet. Donnie says he needs a response by everyone before he can track your locations

LEO: hi other versions of us -Mikey

.

DONNIE: the tech i have to work with here is ancient i hate it. No computer needs to be this chunky

.

MIKEY: mikey is asleep but his phone is receiving -Donnie

.

CASEY: fucking finally. Do you know how many frequencies i had to try to get these messages to come in. not to mention how i had to pry the phone out of Leo's hands so i could take it apart

CASEY: anyways happy to report we haven't gotten him killed yet

CASEY: for the record he came to us bruised that was not our fault

APRIL: great. We can start narrowing down locations now -Don

CASEY: spoke too soon Casey found out about your Casey and she's demanding a fight to the death. Casey might be coming home in pieces

RAPH: wtf

CASEY: do you want him in a box or can i send him in a crate?

RAPH: wtf -Donnie

CASEY: youre right, if he's bleeding the blood will ooze out

.

MIKEY: wtf -everyone here

LEO: wtf -Donnie

DONNIE: i dont know to respond to this -both Donnies

RAPH: damn. put him in a cooler, those are water tight -April

RAPH: please do not listen to her and please dont let any maiming occur -Donnie

----------------------------------------------------------------------

RAPH: by any chance has anyone done the calculations for their own universe? I did ours a couple years ago and its Universe 2-0-1-4 -Donnie

DONNIE: Donnie says this universe is 1-9-8-7. Our home universe is 2-0-1-2

ARPIL: Don says this one is 2003

LEO: Donnie says this is Earth 2,007

RAPH: great. We just cut down a lot of time trying to figure that out. Now we just need to track and calculate your Mikey and Casey’s locations

APRIL: their Dons have probably already done the work themselves. @Mikey @Casey -Don

.

DONNIE: they aren’t answering. Either they can’t get to the computer or they’re sleeping. Lets just begin the math ourselves. Me and Donnie will get started on Mikey. Who wants to track Casey?

LEO: I’ve been collecting data the whole time, I’ll take Casey. The universe he landed in sounds hardcore, if that Donnie wasn’t exaggerating. Casey’s hardcore but we should get him out of there as soon as possible -Donnie

LEO: I think he’s somewhere between 2010 and 2030. Mikey might be in the 1990s -Donnie

RAPH: I don’t know about you guys, but interdimensional travel is not a norm here -Donnie

LEO: Same. Its happened before but I wasn’t prepared to collect data -Donnie

CASEY: @Leo close. We’re Universe 2-0-1-8. And inta-dimensional travel and inter-dimensional travel is a norm here, but not inter-universe travel

.

MIKEY: Donnie says this is universe 19 90

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

CASEY: lmao look at this touch starved fool [5 attachments: couchcuddling.png]

CASEY: I didn’t know humans could turn that red -Mike

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

CASEY: WHATS UP BITCHES NEON LEON IS HERE

CASEY: forgive my brother he is easily excitable -D

CASEY: SO I HEARD YOU NEED PORTAL HELP -L

CASEY: Leo I swear to pizza supreme I will take away your caps feature -D

CASEY: boo no fun. You know we could be in the same room and not have to confuse everyone with two people talking from the same server -L

CASEY: I knew giving you access would be a mistake -D

CASEY: Just send that update video you and Mikey put together for their Casey’s friends -D

CASEY: [attachment: weekoneupdate.mp4] thought you all might like proof of life since Donnie is a horrible texter. Don’t worry about that last part I took care of it. -L

APRIL: the video quality is all corrupted and the only sound I hear is the words “it’s a hard knock life for us” on repeat -Don

RAPH: why is Casey on fire?

CASEY: I told you I took care of it -L

CASEY: he was trying to show off -D

MIKEY: the file won’t download

CASEY: rip -L

CASEY: I will boot you -D

CASEY: but I want to say hi -Mike

CASEY: and Raph wants everyone to know that he’s trying his best to keep Casey alive but that Casey is giving him gray scales -Mike LEO: Can we agree to keep this chat for getting you all back home data and planning only? -Donnie

LEO: how on earth did you get Casey to agree to a spa day?

CASEY: we have girls night once every two weeks. He either had to join or vacate the premises -D

CASEY: he really enjoyed himself! -Mike

CASEY: anyways I agree lets keep this /emergency chat/ open for data and updates only. Hey Leo -D

CASEY: Yes? -L

CASEY: Adios bitch -D

-------- CASEY HAS BEEN BLOCKED FOR 24 HOURS --------

MIKEY: you can block people!?!?!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

CASEY: [attachment: lakeprank.mp4]

RAPH: Donnie’s mad that wasn’t a emergency “im dying” video because he nearly had a heart attack when the whole lair alerted us but the rest of us are laughing so hard. Your April has a great reporter voice. RIP Casey Jones, for his dignity died today. -April

RAPH: also Donnie thinks its fascinating you all look so different/are different turtles. -April

.

LEO: I want to be mad because that also gave me a heart attack but that was funny af. Even through all the grainy quality -Donnie

DONNIE: well both us Donnies are pissed because the video can’t display on these ancient computers and we thought someone died since this is a /emergency/ chat

DONNIE: Leo when did you have the time to teach him 2010s text slang?

LEO: he’s standing next to me rn and telling me what to say -Donnie

.

CASEY: You are all the same turtle species? man your Draxums must be boring. At least ours has some class. Some finesse. Appreciates the art of presentation. What did yours do? Go to the pet store and buy the first four turtles he saw for his experiments? -L

APRIL: we don’t have a Draxum and April says her universe doesn’t either -Don

MIKEY: Never heard of the guy -Donnie

LEO: No draxum and we were never apart of any experiments.

CASEY: so you guys WERENT created through genetic engineering for the sole purpose of being a bioweapon/supersoliders meant to lead armies to wipe out humanity? -L

MIKEY: We were mutated on accident

RAPH: wtf

APRIL: I don’t know how to respond to this, but no we were not -Don

.

LEO: I told you their world was hardcore -Donnie

CASEY: really? Case Man says its pretty chill compared to his. Like he doesn’t have Run Of The Mill but he does have evil aliens so -L

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[theletterunread]

Books in 2022

Uncharacteristically for a midterm year, 2022 sucked. 2006, 2010, and 2014 hosted some of my happiest experiences, and even their worst parts were emotionally rich or educational. 2022 was mostly stagnant, interrupted only by misfortune: illnesses and deaths, harassment, personal and professional setbacks that started on January 2nd and continued through December 29th.

There were nice moments too – everyone should go to at least one Weird Al concert – but they’re obscured in my memory by the relentless slaps to the face. In that same way, when I look over the list of books I read in 2022, I recognize a lot of good titles, yet the overall vibe is one of disappointment. But there’s an unresolved question of cause and effect at hand: did a bad reading list contribute to the mediocrity of the year, or did my existing bad mood prevent me from enjoying these books? Is it the tale or the teller?

Fifth Business, Robertson Davies (Jan. 2-5)

The first volume of the “Deptford Trilogy.” Dunstan Ramsay, a retiring history professor, reviews his own life. The title comes from the narrator’s sense of himself as a supporting actor (neither “Hero, nor Heroine, Confidant nor Villain”) in the more riveting lives of others. Maybe you can already understand my interest in this character. The novel is sophisticated and perceptive about human behavior, and at the end, it reveals itself to have been beautifully plotted too. A thoughtless act by a nasty kid in Ramsay’s neighborhood turns out to have reverberated through generations, and it leads to a dramatic and frightening ending. Frightening because the events are so convincingly presented that you can well imagine an unwelcome conclusion like that rearing up in your own life.

Abandoned Cars, Tim Lane (Jan. 6-10)

Pulpy short stories drawn in a highly detailed, old-fashioned style. The drawings carry it. The writing isn’t bad, but it’s a lot of those, “lonely men, open roads, cigarettes, greasy spoons, crooners on the jukebox” kind of stories. A midcentury nostalgia that was picked clean a long time ago.

A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews (Jan. 9-16)

A teenaged Mennonite in Manitoba dreams of a more exciting life in New York City. I can sympathize with the heroine’s dreams, and I did like learning about Mennonite life, a world I know nothing about and the author knows intimately. But the details were ultimately so foreign to me that there was a limit to how much I could get into the novel. It’s hard to know how perceptive an observation is when you have no idea what’s being perceived. Still, people whose tastes I trust (my dad; the cartoonist Tim Kreider) admire Toews, so let’s call this my failure.

Stone Fruit, Lee Lai (Jan. 11-13)

At the start of the book, Ray and Bron are happy aunts to a six-year-old niece. But soon, their relationship ends, and they’re sunk into an unhappiness that’s not alleviated by the families they turn to. It’s all pretty bleak, but not unfairly so. The emotions the characters endure are realistic and earned, so while you might feel depressed at the end, you won’t feel manipulated. Plus, there are some great illustrations, particularly of the friendly monsters that the niece imagines while playing with her aunts.

The Manticore, Robertson Davies (Jan. 17-25)

The second part of the “Deptford Trilogy,” following David Staunton, the son of the rotten kid from the first book, as he undergoes Jungian analysis, a subject I know little about. But the little bit that I understand (or misunderstand), I like. It’s much more internal than Fifth Business, the scope is narrower, and the stakes are lower, but it’s just as intelligent and well-written.

A Map of Betrayal, Ha Jin (Jan. 26 - Feb. 1)

The main story is of Gary Shang, a double agent working for the CIA and passing information back to China while dealing with his American family and his conflicting loyalties. The framing story is of Gary’s daughter learning of her father’s past and reckoning with it. As usual, Jin’s insight into his characters’ emotional lives is terrific and effortlessly rendered. The details of this particular plot, however, are not quite so successful. Some of the set-up is unconvincing, and there are plot turns that feel sketchy. Not so much that you’ll have to put the book down, but don’t go in expecting another Waiting.

Tintin: The Complete Companion, Michael Farr (Feb. 2-21)

The second book I read to supplement 2021’s reread of the entire Tintin series. This one deals with the factual background for the stories and the artistic process by which Hergé wrote and drew each volume – as opposed to The Metamorphoses of Tintin, which I read two months earlier, and which took a more academic view. This book is beautiful to look at, featuring details of the series’ artwork and clippings from Hergé’s archives, but neither this nor Metamorphoses really deepens the pleasure of reading the actual books. Maybe what I’m looking for is a third path: a book that doesn’t take a technical or academic approach to the series, but rather an aesthetic and emotional approach. Maybe I should stop whining and write that book myself.

World of Wonders, Robertson Davies (Feb. 3-8)

The last book in the “Deptford Trilogy.” More like Fifth Business than The Manticore, this one again covers most of a lifetime – this time, of the magician Magnus Eisengrim, who is linked, from birth, to Dunstan Ramsey and David Staunton. This one ties up some of the remaining threads from the other two books, if that sort of thing is important to you, and it’s all about stage magic, something I always like reading about (in fact, this book lead me to seek out the one three spots down this list). On balance, it’s not as good as The Manticore, which itself is not as good as Fifth Business, but those are only relative markings. There’s no reason not to read all three.

On Animals, Susan Orlean (Feb. 9-15)

A collection of essays about domestic animals and wild animals. Though there are interesting stories of whales, tigers, and other majestic creatures, the essay that affected me the most was about homing pigeons, perhaps because their feats were the most beautiful to me. Because this is a collection of pieces written separately and later cobbled together, it doesn’t have the thematic strength that her single-subject books do, but it’s worth reading nonetheless.

Pocket Kings, Ted Heller (Feb. 16-23)

A funny book about a stalled-out novelist who starts playing poker and becomes a relative success while the rest of his life falls apart. The plot doesn’t matter too much. You’re in it for the wittiness and intelligence of each individual paragraph. Towards the end, there’s a great section where we’re urged to reconsider the wisdom of a dozen pithy quotes by famous writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “There are no second acts in American lives” is challenged by the records of “Richard Nixon, Muhammad Ali, John Travolta, Bill Clinton or…F. Scott Fitzgerald.” There’s also a good joke when the narrator accuses the novelist Zoë Heller of leveraging her last name to mislead readers into thinking she’s related to Joseph Heller – a joke that became even better when I learned that Ted Heller is actually Joseph Heller’s son.

Penn & Teller’s Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (Feb. 24-26)

When I was in high school, I read their other two books: How to Play with Your Food and How to Play in Traffic, both of which were full of worthy anecdotes and some magic tricks I’ve deployed throughout the years to mild approval. This one was less good. There are fewer interesting passages, and much of the book serves as a trick in and of itself. For example, half of the pages are illegible, printed in what the book itself calls, “itty bitty tiny irritating psycho-print,” so that it can be used as a prop in one of the tricks the legible pages teach you. Clever, but how can you not feel conned yourself when half of the pages are unreadable?

David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel, J. Russell Perkin (Mar. 3-7)

Another academic analysis of a favorite author, another unsatisfying read. Why do I keep picking these up? There’s nothing wrong with what Perkin says about David Lodge, and as members of the same relatively small fandom, I feel a kinship with him. But there’s no response possible to somebody else’s analysis besides (a) agreeing or (b) presenting a competing analysis. I hope he got an A for this thesis, but as a book, it does nothing for me.

Dracula, Bram Stoker (Mar. 7-17)

Foolishly, I wrote my own vampire stories before ever reading Dracula. I suppose I thought that, since the story has been absorbed into our collective consciousness, there was no need to read it. Maybe you feel that way. That is not so. It’s a very good book, even if it doesn’t surprise us the way it would have its first readers. It’s perfectly paced and vividly rendered, and, although the subject is masked by the nineteenth-century propriety of its language, I think you’ll be excited by how sexually charged the novel is. An early scene of the brides of Dracula descending on a victim will have you sweating.

All The Answers, Michael Kupperman (Mar. 11-14)

Michael Kupperman’s father was a boy genius who appeared on a panel show in the 1940s, answering tricky math questions. Being a child star was not a positive experience for him and he grew into a withdrawn adult, who never shared memories of his childhood with his son. Kupperman’s book is both a biography of his father and a memoir of his attempts to connect with a distant parent. In that sense, and because it’s a comic, it invites some comparisons to Maus, but that’s a pretty tenuous comparison. I only make it because the book doesn’t offer much to hold on to. Neither half of it is bad, but it never achieves escape velocity, perhaps because the father at the center of it all remains unknown to us and to Kupperman.

The Art of Fiction, David Lodge (Mar. 19-24)

A collection of newspaper columns from the novelist. In 50 entries, he discusses one element of the novel (opening lines, point of view, symbolism, the title, unreliable narrators, etc.), and illustrates his points with excerpts from modern and classical novels. It’s all very smart and very digestible, and if you’re trying to write a novel, you’d surely find some useful tricks to borrow. My favorite piece is the one on naming characters, in which Lodge cannily compares the deliberately suggestive names "Robyn Penrose" and "Victor Wilcox" in his own novel Nice Work to the name "Quinn" in Paul Auster's City of Glass. Quinn is a name that “flies off in so many little directions at once,” and if a name can mean anything, it ultimately means nothing at all – which, as Lodge rightly points out, is the point of that existential book.

Fictional Father, Joe Ollman (Mar. 19-23)

The story of a newspaper cartoonist who became rich and famous for his sappy father-and-son comic strip while ignoring and abusing his own son. This is a made-up story, but apparently – as Ollman himself only discovered after he’d written it – it’s very congruent to the real life story of Hank Ketcham, creator of Dennis the Menace. Though Ollman sees and draws out the real emotions of in this dynamic, his book is played mostly for laughs and is mostly successful. Lots of funny dialogue and a drawing style that makes everyone look laughable.

The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson (Mar. 26-30)

The classic novel about a dissolute alcohol’s weeklong binge. The best scene is when he makes a half-joking/half-serious attempt to steal a stranger’s purse to fund his addiction. In addition to how well it works as a sad character study, it’s also one of those books that transports you to a bygone urban landscape – if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri (Mar. 31 - Apr. 4)

I find Lahiri’s work both irresistible and highly resistible. I like it because it’s so good, so intelligent, so precise, and so effective. I reject it because that same expertise leaves me feeling manipulated. It provokes an emotional response, yes, but because what’s provoked is always the only emotional response made available by the text, you have the sense that you’ve been moved from A to B to C without your input. A friend of mine says writing like this is akin to a sniper’s bullet: the marksmanship is incredible, but how good are you going to feel about the results? Oh, but this book in particular? It’s fine. A woman without a name wanders through a European city without a name, thinking. A little more diffuse and experimental than her other books, but in the end it feels…well, you know.

Amateurs, Dylan Hicks (Apr. 7-11)

I hardly remember this one. It was about a group of twentysomethings, tied together by threads of romance, thwarted romance, friendship, and competitiveness. Was there a wedding? A road trip to get to that wedding? I’m not sure. My recollection is that the book was good, not bad, but I have no evidence to back that up.

Don’t Come in Here, Patrick Kyle (Apr. 10)

A little comic book. Not much of a narrative. Just a showcase of trippy artwork, which wasn’t bad. What I remember most was returning this book to the library and it not being checked back in, obligating me to call up the circulation desk before I could be slammed with a humiliating late fee.

The Long Prospect, Elizabeth Harrower (Apr. 12-16)

An Australian novel about a young girl who lives a stifling life in a boarding house owned by her unpleasant grandmother. One boarder, a scientist, takes the girl under his wing. That’s the set-up, but I can’t animate any of the characters. Like Amateurs, the action of the book has been completely forgotten. Unlike Amateurs, the feeling that remains is not positive.

To Know You’re Alive, Dakota McFadzean (Apr. 14-15)

A collection of off-kilter, slightly spooky stories. There’s a cute one about how our culture might react if a boring alien landed on Earth, a creepy one about the discovery of a lost piece of children’s media, an eggheaded appraisal of Super Mario Bros. 2, and a silent nightmare with an inescapable cereal mascot. They’re all fun.

Let Us Be Perfectly Clear, Paul Hornschemeier (Apr. 16-17)

Another collection of short comics. The design of the book is clever. There are two halves: Let Us Be, printed from the front of the book to the middle; and Perfectly Clear, printed from the back of the book to the middle. But the stories themselves are less memorable than the package.

Hanging On, Edmund G. Love (Apr. 17-24)

Pulled off a library shelf at random, I think I may be the only person to have ever checked it out. A memoir of a being a teenager and sometimes college student in Michigan during the Great Depression. Though there are few highs and many lows when you grow up in that era, the book is a breezy, amusing read, so long as you don’t get hung up with resentment after learning that his tuition to attend the University of Michigan was only about $100 per year.

Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson (Apr. 21-23)

A little illustrated travel diary. Thompson wrote it while he was traveling around, promoting Blankets. It’s trifling, but fine. I had a stomach flu at the start of the year, so a sequence of Thompson suffering from food poisoning made me feel seen.

King of King Court, Travis Dandro (Apr. 24-28)

A very good memoir of childhood. It’s drawn in a chunky, juvenile style, but the material is pretty harrowing. Dandro’s dad was a heroin addict, his stepfather was an alcoholic, and his mom was understandably harried and overwhelmed. Dandro’s perspective is mature and empathetic, but he’s still able to recall and illustrate the feelings of fear and anger and shame that can arise in kids when they have unwelcome encounters with the adult world. It sounds like a painful read, but it’s not at all.

Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs (Apr. 27 – May 5)

A memoir about the physical spaces Mairs has occupied: both houses and her own body. Her approach is scattershot, but I liked that. There’s a tendency towards loftiness and know-it-all-ism in memoirists (fair enough, given that the alternative is to concede that the stories from your life are meaningless, in which case, how self-indulgent is it to publish them?), but Mairs avoids it. She presents her book with the attitude that writing is not the summation of life, but just another action taken by the living. Illustrating that point is a moment where she writes of publishing a personal essay about her affair and discovering that, contrary to what she thought, her husband didn’t know about it – until he read the printed story.

Nutshell, Ian McEwan (May 7-11)

Told from the perspective of a fetus, as he listens in on the sinister machinations and plotting of his mother and her lover. It’s clever and the high concept doesn’t wear thin. Embarrassingly, I didn’t realize until I had finished the book that it was retelling the story of Hamlet, even though the title comes from one of the only lines of that play I can confidently quote.

Level Up, Gene Luen Yang & Thien Pham (May 11-12)

The main character’s strict father won’t buy him a Nintendo Entertainment System. When the father dies, the hero buys an NES, and develops a passion for video games that becomes a crutch whenever he falters in life. Eventually, he’s set upon by some cherubs or angels who act as his guilty conscience, obliging him to follow his late father’s wishes for him. The main idea here – the hero’s challenge to find his individual happiness without disappointing or disrespecting his family – is handled well, but I can’t help but wish that video games hadn’t been the subject the story was spun around. I like video games, and respect their intelligence and artistic merit…but every time people try to transplant them into another medium, the operation is a failure, and the subject dies on the table.

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (May 12-21)

A book that tries your patience, if it’s possible to say that without being totally negative. A pianist arrives in a new city in advance of a concert and is soon dragged all over the city for endless, perplexing meetings and chores. The story is presented like a dream, where characters pop up randomly, and locations can be endlessly distant in one moment and right around the corner in the next. The thing is, dreams are always more interesting to the dreamer than to any audience, so the book can be frustrating at times, even if you accept its structure. Still, it’s impressive that he pulled off such a stunt for 500 pages, and the quality of Ishiguro’s prose is bright and beautiful as always.

Perchance to Dream, Charles Beaumont (May 23-29)

Twilight Zone-esque tales from a writer for The Twilight Zone. Actually, many of the stories in this book became scripts for that show. But they work in either medium. The best is “The Howling Man,” about a traveler in Europe who comes across a group of monks who are keeping a strange prisoner. Inventive and tidy and not bogged down by any need for meaning, these are the sort of stories I’ve been trying to write recently.

Passport, Sophia Glock (May 28-30)

As a teenager, Glock discovered that her secretive parents were actually spies working for the CIA. I think that’s the set-up for Spy Kids, but this book goes in a less bombastic direction. It’s a fairly conventional coming-of-age story, as Sophia makes friends and enemies, goes out to parties, and learns to accept herself. It’s okay, and there’s something amusingly anticlimactic about the irrelevance of her parents’ profession to Glock’s own story, but you won’t be mesmerized by this book.

The Resisters, Gish Jen (May 30 - June 2)

A baseball prodigy tries to find happiness in a dystopian future. I sped through this book, surprised at how tolerable it was, but by the end, my general disinterest in dystopian stories won out. The nod-your-head-sadly parallels to our current culture are more wearying than enlightening. The baseball scenes are okay, though. That sport translates well to the page.

Come Along With Me, Shirley Jackson (June 4-9)

The title comes from an unfinished novella included in this collection, but it and every other story are overshadowed by “The Lottery,” which is as good as its reputation holds. The next best inclusion is Jackson’s essay about the reception “The Lottery” got. In addition to the reams of letters from people incapable of understanding that her story was fictional and convinced that there really did exist a small town that committed ritual stoning, she received a fawning letter, to which she politely responded, “I admire your work, too,” only to discover that she had responded to an accused axe murderer. On the far opposite end, this collection also has “Pajama Party,” a cute domestic comedy about a child’s first sleepover. I liked that one too.

Twists of Fate, Paco Roca (June 9-11)

I’ll compare this one to Maus too, and I’ll be on firmer ground: a comic book about a young man painstakingly drawing out the war stories of an elderly man. The man fought against the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, fled to Algeria, joined the Allied forces, and was party of the forces that liberated Paris from the Nazis. But he was never able to return to Spain to liberate it from Franco, a regret that gnaws at him, even at age 94. That’s a good story, and it digs into some underexposed history, but I was never fully convinced of the need for the framing device.

Memoir of a Gambler, Jack Richardson (June 12-19)

A little bit like a non-fiction version of Pocket Kings. After his divorce, Richardson crosses the country, and eventually the globe, playing poker in high and low places. There’s not a lot of happiness in this world, and Richardson does nothing to change that, but his cold and precise rendering of his adventures (and really, they are adventures: he’s not just sitting at the tables for the whole book) are entrancing. His description of the geography of Las Vegas – which, by chance, I was reading as I flew into Las Vegas – should on its own be enough to shut down the city.

Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker (June 21-25)

The true story of a large family in Colorado Springs, some of whom were acquainted with my uncles. There are 12 children, and half of them are ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia, leading to much grief but ultimately making the family a fruitful source of data for medical researchers. It’s a sad book, and like all good documentaries, it makes you feel guilty for being witness to what you’re seeing.

Lovesickness, Junji Ito (June 24-26)

A collection of unsettling, grotesque comics. Exactly what I was expecting and hoping for when I picked it up, yet I was unmoved by the collection. The territory is just the same as in Uzumaki, which I’d read the year before, but as a set of independent (rather than linked) stories, the material doesn’t have a chance to develop an insidious feeling or any thematic resonance. It’s more a series of satisfactory but forgettable shocks.

Thin Places, Jordan Kisner (June 27 – July 3)

These are the sort of essays all NYU freshman are taught to write: pick three or four subjects – usually a selection from personal experience, history, a piece of art, and an event, place, or occurrence in our culture – and juxtapose them in every pairing until you reach your page count. It’s a very mechanical process, and my experience being taught it left me prone to resist this form. And yet I liked this collection well enough. Kisner is honest, most of her insights are well-articulated, and though there’s no humor in these essays (the form won’t allow it), she doesn’t fill that vacuum with pretension, as my classmates and I always did.

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (July 6-9)

There’s a party game called Humiliation, where you reveal that you've never actually encountered some huge culture monument, and you get points for each person at the party who has. For a long time (still, in fact), I could say I’ve never seen Titanic and scoop up a bunch of points. That was my go-to because I was too embarrassed to confess to an even bigger miss: I had never read The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a wonderful book, though. Very funny and very moving. What surprised me was how much I admired Holden Caulfield. I don’t just mean that I understood and accepted his adolescent angst. I actually think he’s a noble person. His anger may sometimes be misplaced and his sense of righteousness can be overly dogmatic, but those are habits that usually pass with age, and what will be left is the sensitivity, intelligence, and moral strength that’s plainly evident beneath his clumsy exterior.

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, Harvey Pekar, et al. (July 7-13)

Autobiographical comics by another admirable grouch. I had never read any American Splendor stories before, maybe because their multiple art styles (Pekar wrote the comics but had a variety of other artists draw them) seemed wearying to me. And truthfully, that quality still does nothing for me. But the writing is great. The stories vary in subject and length and presentation, but every one of them is closely observed and intelligent about the way people talk and act and think. The ordinariness of life (and of Cleveland) is rendered with extreme beauty. And Pekar himself is a great hero. Another noble crank who’s critical and passionate and full of fury, yet never unkind and never less than generous.

I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying, Bassey Ikpi (July 10-13)

A pain-filled memoir, this one about bipolar disorder, disassociation, and the Challenger explosion. It’s mostly engaging, though there are parts in the back half where useful details seem to be missing and it becomes hard to follow. Given the subject matter, this may not be unintentional.

Crash Site, Nathan Cowdry (July 14-15)

Edgelord stuff run through several layers of irony. Lots of violence and provocative dialogue stacked up in such a way that it’s impossible to tell whom the author is trying to provoke: those who would take offensive or those who would deny the validity of being offended. I sort of see the point, and I didn’t hate the book. But at a certain point, you wish Cowdry would stop fooling around and just write a real story.

Amnesty, Aravind Adiga (July 16-19)

A young migrant worker in Sydney comes across a murder. If he reports it, he risks deportation, a fact that the murderer is all too happy to rub his nose in. It’s a good blend of a thriller and a social commentary. I also liked that fact that it was taking Australia and its cultural values to task. Not that I personally have anything against Australia, but it’s a country that you rarely see condemned, so I appreciated getting to reading a rare (and surely well-deserved) scolding.

Onion Skin, Edgar Camacho (July 17-18)

The story of a couple that runs a food truck and finds themselves in a turf war. It holds your attention while you’re reading it, but it’s a mess, jumping around in time and in tone. Plus, the relationship at its center is very tired: a mopey guy finds his life reinvigorated by a free-spirited girl. The food looked good, though.

Popcorn, Ben Elton (July 21-24)

A Hollywood satire written by a Brit, so it has that some of the stiffness and artificiality that can come in when writers try to cross the pond. But on the whole, it’s funny and astute about the industry. The ending overemphasizes its lessons, but I liked that Elton didn’t shy away from the mayhem he’d been teasing.

Brownsville, Neil Kleid & Jake Allen (July 22-23)

The familiar story of growing up in New York, being attracted to the mafia, and eventually joining it. The twist this time is that it’s the Jewish mafia. Interesting? Not really. That detail hardly changes anything, so the arc and most of the individual scenes in this book are rote in conception and in execution. Your favorite mafia story, whatever it is, will give you as much as this book and more.

My Man Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (July 29 - Aug. 1)

An early and unpolished collections of short stories. Given that Wodehouse later rewrote most of these pieces, the decent thing to do might have been to let this collection go out of print. Fewer laughs than Wodehouse usually provides, though there are still a couple of big ones, such as one character’s passing idea to make money by selling anarchists and other dispossessed people the opportunity to beat up his rich uncle.

Good Eggs, Rebecca Hardiman (Aug. 6-10)

A warm-hearted comedy about an Irish family. There’s the grandma who keeps making trouble, the rebellious teen with a soft, sentimental center, and the harried father caught in between the generations, trying to keep everything running smoothly. Eventually, they’re all put on the same side of the field when they have to take on an American who’s scammed them. It’s nothing remarkable, and I didn’t laugh too much – perhaps not at all – but sometimes it’s enough if a book features one element close to your heart. In my case, it was the suburban Dublin setting.

Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22, MariNaomi (Aug. 9-11)

A catalog of intimate relationships ranging from crushes to long-term relationships. To some degree, it’s all contextualized by its setting (the Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s), and by how the author views her relationships in comparison to that of her parents. But mostly, it’s just a list, and one that becomes quickly repetitive.

The Library Book, Susan Orlean (Aug. 11-14)

Possibly a perfect non-fiction book. In 1986, a fire broke out at the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, wiping out 20% of its collection. Orlean covers that disaster and it subsequent investigation, but she also makes room for the history of the LAPL, discourse on the function of libraries in America, personal reflections, academic theorizing, and science experiments (the chapter about her own attempt to burn a book is one of the best parts). The arson at the heart of this story is compelling enough to make this book good in anyone’s hands, but in Orlean's, it’s great.

I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, Juan Pablo Villalobos (Aug. 16-21)

Another fun mash-up. This time the blend is crime thriller, campus novel, and metafiction. Juan Pablo is a Mexican student who is abducted before leaving to study abroad in Spain, and ordered to get close to a corrupt politician by falling in love with his daughter. The plot is knowingly ridiculous and, though you eventually give up on trying to follow it, it’s amusing all the way through. There’s also a fun essay at the end, in which the translator explains his difficulty in capturing the voices of the different narrators, conceding with admirable frankness that he’s not sure he succeeded.

The Bridge, Peter J. Tomasi and Sara DuVall (Aug. 17-20)

The true story of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. If you don’t know it already, the fun detail is that the chief engineer became overworked in the middle of construction, and spent the rest of it monitoring the bridge’s construction from his bed while his wife took over as de facto leader at the job site. The standard details of how to build an enormous bridge are also fun to learn about, and the authors do a good job making you share in the stress of the workers deep below the water.

Woke Up This Morning, Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa, and Philip Lerman (Aug. 23-28)

An oral history of The Sopranos cobbled together from the podcast Imperioli and Schirripa started a few years ago. That show is endlessly discussable, and the book has a few funny stories and some thoughtful analysis, and it’s certainly better to read this book than to listen to the podcast (did I tell you I’ve declared a war on podcasts?), but I don't know…I found myself growing less and less interested the more I read. Once the initial fun of being a fly on the wall passed, I recalled that The Sopranos is strong enough to speak for itself.

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, Brian Kellow (Aug. 30 - Sep. 4)

A thorough biography that features and contextualizes lots of excellent film reviews by Kael. It also reveals some of her astonishing lapses of ethics. In 1971, she published, “Raising Kane,” an essay about the authorship of Citizen Kane’s screenplay. It’s a terrific piece of writing, but it’s extremely shoddy journalism that has since been disproven. Even worse, much of her research was stolen from a UCLA professor, whom she never credited. It’s a shocking revelation and Kellow presents it without excuses. That chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

Love That Bunch, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (Sep. 2-5)

Autobiographical comics from one half of an underground comix power couple. A relationship that’s mostly been presented through her husband Robert Crumb’s eyes is shown here from Kominsky-Crumb’s perspective instead. But the thing is, they’re a very well-matched couple, so their perspectives aren’t all that different. And honestly, neither of their styles are terribly interesting to me, accomplished though they are. Still, you can admire Kominsky-Crumb’s pioneering efforts, and she and her husband and their unconventional family are pretty cute, no matter how repellant this book tries to make them seem.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (Sep. 6-10)

Another classic that I’m only just now getting around to. A hair less interesting than Dracula – the old-fashioned formality of the writing makes it a less ripping read – but still great. Dr. Frankenstein and his monster are both fascinating and complex, and the whole story is genuinely haunting and ambitious in scope. The framing device of the Arctic voyagers who witness the end of Frankenstein’s story seems impossibly contemporary. Considering how young Shelley was when she wrote something so good, hers may be the greatest accomplishment in the history of literature.

This is How I Disappear, Mirion Malle (Sep. 10-12)

Another mental health story. Because this one is done as a comic, not as prose, it can place us immediately into the shoes of its protagonist and let us feel her pain, which is a point in its favor. Working against it is the abundance of scenes, dialogue, and plot points driven by text messages and social media messaging. As always happens when those elements are spotlighted in a story, they dial the energy of the book down to nearly zero. (I'm not letting myself off the hook: I've tanked my own pieces that way.) That technology is an important part of our lives and our culture, and someday somebody will find a way to mill it into art, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The Plot Against America, Philip Roth (Sep. 11-17)

It had been nearly 15 years since I read anything by Roth. This was a good one to restart with. An alternate history of Roth’s childhood if the United States had elected Charles Lindbergh over FDR in 1940. The family drama and the political drama are equally engaging, and Roth even leans into the ridiculous fun of speculative fiction with a big, ludicrous twist in the last fifth of the book that guides everything to a satisfying resolution.

Loved and Lost, Jeffrey Brown (Sep. 14-18)

Three graphic novels covering three of Brown’s formative romances. Sincere, but sort of wimpy. I don’t want to cross a line and start critiquing anybody’s personal emotional repertoire – I’m just talking about what’s recorded on the page. The happy moments we see of his relationships are moments of quiet companionship. There’s almost nothing about adventures or inside jokes or mutual discoveries – the exuberant parts of a relationship. Quiet companionship is an important part of love too, and if that’s the pitch at which Brown lives his life, there’s nothing wrong with that, and he should record it accurately. But the pleasure of reading about it is faint.

Fame Adjacent, Sarah Skilton (Sep. 20-24)

A fun and original novel. The narrator is a former child actor, the only one from her troupe of singers and dancers not to become famous. The first part of the book has her in rehab for her internet addiction. The second part has her road-tripping to New York for a reunion with her castmates. It’s a lively book (a quality in short supply in too many novels), and I want to commend Skilton for pulling off a trick that’s harder than you might think: the fake TV show that she creates is credible. Often the fictional media contained within books (and TV shows and movies, for that matter) seems either implausible – we don’t believe a TV show so described would ever air – or like a poorly disguised version of an existing piece of media – distracting us as we look for the Easter eggs in this universe’s version of Seinfeld. But Skilton’s invention (Diego and the Lion’s Den) is totally believable, and its details are nicely fleshed out.

Seek You, Kristen Radtke (Sep. 21-25)

Another bit of brainy graphic essaying by Radtke. The subject is loneliness – Radke’s and America’s. Surrounding the personal reflections, there is a lot of well-synthesized research and bright analysis. And how about this for a good definition to carry with you: “Loneliness isn’t necessarily tied to whether you have a partner or a best friend or an aspirationally active social life. It’s a variance that rests in the space between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.” My only complaint is about a section where, talking of television sitcoms, she blurs the important distinction between canned laugh tracks and the laughter of live studio audiences – but that’s only a personal hang-up of mine.

All About Me!, Mel Brooks (Sep. 25 - Oct. 1)

A very happy memoir by a very happy guy. Lots of warm stories stretching from his childhood to his dotage, and some triumphant moments where he outwits boneheaded Hollywood executives. He’s justly proud of his own talents and achievements, but he spends more of the book heaping genuine, specific praise on other actors and writers he’s worked with. Tellingly, the only colleague who’s recollected with even the slightest negativity is Jerry Lewis…

Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, Chester Brown (Oct. 1-3)

An illustrated collection of stories from the Bible that Brown believes evince a pro-sex work attitude in early Christianity. As somebody with almost no preexisting feelings about the Gospels, I’m an easy mark for any interpretation. Brown, who has spent the last 25 years visiting prostitutes, is not exactly a detached analyst here, but whatever his motivations for writing this book, his evaluation of the Bible’s text is convincing enough. The trouble for me was that, irrespective of their political meaning, I found the Gospel stories themselves distasteful and unkind.

Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs (Oct. 2-4)

The blurbs all compare him to David Sedaris, but that’s inapt. There’s nothing funny about Burroughs’ story, and the comparison seems to me like laziness, an inability to distinguish two very different types of memoir. With that pedantry out of the way: this is a good book. As a teenager, Burroughs is put in the care of his mother’s psychiatrist, a dangerous blowhard who keeps a filthy and miserable home. Burroughs witnesses and endures a lot of horrors over the course of five years, and though he’s never self-pitying nor seeking of praise, I did feel admiration for his escape and his ability to transmogrify his life into art.

Hollywood Said No!, Bob Odenkirk & David Cross with Brian Posehn (Oct. 6-8)

Two never-produced screenplays and other sundry material by some of the brains behind Mr. Show. Not their best work, but I smiled a lot while reading it. I did object, however, to their attacks on Jamie Kennedy, towards whom I feel an odd and misapplied sense of protectiveness.

The Road Through the Wall, Shirley Jackson (Oct. 8-14)

Jackson’s first novel, in which she exposes the ugliness, prejudice and misery beneath the surface of a privileged upper-class neighborhood. That’s pretty shopworn material these days, but remember: she did it in 1948. The novel is decent – I liked the scene where two teenagers seek a transgressive thrill but the best they find is a secret tea party with a butler – and the gruesome ending does still shock. But it’s weighed down by having too many indistinguishable characters.

Clyde Fans, Seth (Oct. 14-17)

A meticulously drawn book about a generational struggle to keep open a family business. The artwork is impressive, but I just can’t summon up any enthusiasm for this story and its themes: the agony of being a salesman, the inability of men of a certain generation to share their feelings, and more of that midcentury nostalgia I complained about earlier.

Ostrich, Matt Greene (Oct. 15-17)

A 12-year-old boy with brain tumor narrates an otherwise typical story of growing up (parents, friends, school, burgeoning sexual feelings). There are some clever and funny lines, but I grew less and less convinced I was hearing the honest voice of a child as opposed to the practiced remarks of a novelist.

Mr. Mercedes, Stephen King (Oct. 20-29)

A retired detective is taunted by a murderous psychopath and begins a private investigation to catch the killer. My hopes for this one weren’t quite met. The plotting is fine, and some tension builds well in the last act, but none of the characters feel like more than placeholders, and the gruesome details (particularly in the killer’s backstory) are nowhere near King’s best. Also, King’s efforts to write dialogue for a Black teenager result in some embarrassing lines that I won’t quote here.

The Only Story, Julian Barnes (Nov. 4-9)

I picked it up because it was about tennis, and discovered that Barnes was an author I should have been reading for years. A man recounts his “only story,” of being a college student home for the summer and falling in love with a middle-aged woman he’s partnered with for a game of doubles. The direction the story takes doesn’t matter. What I liked about the book was how intelligently and unpretentiously Barnes writes, and how deeply he digs into important questions. The book opens with, “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.” And before you have a chance to reflect on how well put that is, Barnes challenges himself: “You may point out—correctly—that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice…if you can control it, then it isn’t love.” The array of thoughts those four sentences evoke would be accomplishment enough for most novelists, but it’s only the first of many treats Barnes offers.

Hummingbird Heart, Travis Dandro (Nov. 5-7)

The sequel to King of King Court, picking up on Dandro’s life as he hacks his way through his teen years. All of the praise-worthy qualities of the first book are present…but less so. The intelligence of the writing and the appeal of the drawing style are still there, but the subject is less interesting, more well-worn: shoplifting teenage boys learning to put aside their anger and face the fact that they must grow up. It’s done well, but only well, and Dandro's previous book set the bar higher.

Palimpsest, Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom (Nov. 9-12)

A very angry memoir of an adoptee seeking out her roots. The author directs anger at her adopted country, at her country of birth, at bureaucrats from all over, and at herself. All of which is well-earned, and the point that Sjöblom makes early on is that she wishes to counteract the rosy prevailing narrative of the experience of international adoptees. I would push back slightly by noting that Sjöblom sometimes seems to not just want to dismantle that narrative, but to replace it with one that’s equally overbroad – her own – not realizing that that would be just as limiting. But that minor quibble aside, this is worth reading.

Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford (Nov. 12-16)

There’s a lot of trauma recounted in this memoir of growing up with an abusive mother and an incarcerated father, and Ford renders it all calmly and dispassionately, yet still with a keen memory of the pain she felt. If you can handle that sort of material, this book offers it about as well as it could be done. And Ford shares a few memories that stick with you long after the book is done, like a scene of her grandmother setting ablaze a nest of snakes.

The Third Person, Emma Grove (Nov. 16-20)

This one sneaks up on you, and soon, you’ll be flying through its 900 pages. Grove is a transgender woman visiting a therapist to be approved for hormone therapy. As the sessions progress and Toby the therapist learns more about Grove and her past, he begins to think that she may have Dissociative Identity Disorder, which he feels must be addressed prior to any other medical care. The drawing style is simple and flat, and much of the book is given over to repetitive scenes of therapy sessions, which may sound boring, but it’s actually very easy to become absorbed in their discussions. And the therapist isn’t just a prop to give Grove somebody to talk to; he’s a real character whom we see as clumsier and more unprofessional the longer the book goes on.

This Is Not My Beautiful Life, Victoria Fedden (Nov. 17-20)

While Fedden was pregnant and staying with her family in Florida, her parents’ house was raided by the feds. This memoir touches on her dysfunctional family, their legal travails, and the goofy (and, to my eyes, could-not-be-less-desirable) experience of living in Florida. The details of her family’s unique experiences give the book some early momentum, but the humor doesn’t progress beyond zaniness, and eventually, the book spins off in fragmentary, underexplored directions in an unsuccessful search for a point.

Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Nov. 24-30)

I broke my informal rule and read more than one Stephen King book in 2022. This one is a collection of stories, and it’s more successful than Mr. Mercedes. There are 13 stories, and at least nine of them work. Particularly good are “Stationary Bike,” one of those tales about a living painting; “The Gingerbread Girl,” about an obsessive runner; and N., an old-fashioned novella about a psychiatrist who takes on his patient’s obsession.

The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, Jana Casale (Dec. 1-8)

A highly internal novel about a Millennial in Boston who aspires to be a writer. No, don’t run away: this one is actually good. Leda, the protagonist, is seen in a number of quiet, precise vignettes, moving through college and her early 20s, trying to be a friend and a lover and a daughter and a romantic partner. I thought I’d had my fill of these stories (both from other books and from my own droning life), but I found room to let this one in. My interest waned in the last third, once the character grows up and we accelerate through her adulthood and old age, but up until then, it’s absorbing.

Fun, Paolo Bacilieri (Dec. 2-5)

A graphic novel about the history of the crossword puzzle, woven around a knowingly melodramatic mystery, all told in a vaguely meta style. It’s pretty busy, and though it delivers on the fun promised in the title while you’re reading it, it doesn’t stick with you.

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (Dec. 10-15)

A book my mom was recommending to everyone 25 years ago. An askew story of the Antichrist being swapped at birth and of the junky Armageddon that follows. It’s cute and funny, and though I get a little impatient with British whimsy these days, it's well-deployed here. The cast is so sprawling that it becomes a little unwieldy – this is probably an asset in its miniseries adaptation – but there aren’t any characters whose sections you dread.

With the Fire on High, Elizabeth Acevedo (Dec. 23-29)

The first young adult novel I had read in many years, about a high school senior with a talent for cooking who must learn to trust in and prioritize her own dreams. It had been a while since I read a book with a lesson, and shifting gears took some time. But once I did, I was happy to go along and cheer the main character’s triumph. I read most of this book on a six-hour train ride through California’s Central Valley, seated next to a man without a neutral odor, so its many descriptions of aromatic food were very welcome.

***

It was not my favorite year of reading, but curiously, I read more books in 2022 than in any other year since I’ve been keeping track. Maybe it was overextension that led to a less positive experience. Maybe my mood was brought down by two or three too many painful memoirs. Or maybe I should just internalize the lessons of Ted Heller and Jack Richardson, and accept that sometimes life deals you a bum hand. That can be true of a year or of a reading list.

But I did discover those two authors. And finally mark off Dracula, The Catcher in the Rye, and Frankenstein. And one Susan Orlean makes up for a hundred Brownsvilles. In order to maintain my enthusiasm for writing in the face of the constant beatings 2022 offered, I had to accept the old lesson about taking pleasure in the creative act itself and not being preoccupied about where the final product would lead me. That equanimous outlook is just as useful pointed towards the writing of others, remembering that, whatever the yearly average turns out to be, the pleasure of reading any one good book is never diminished.

[ousama]

the last recorded fatal bear attack in New Hampshire took place in 1784, on an eight year old boy. since then, fatal bear attacks in New England have been fairly uncommon, even back when the area was not as "urbanized" as it is now. much of the east side of the country (canada has its own problems, as northern quebec has its share of bears) is not at particular risk for deadly bear attacks. this is more likely due to the rapid urbanization and the populations of black bears, which are comparatively smaller and less confrontational (or predatory on humans) than their brown counterparts. iirc the last wild bear-related death in pennsylvania was also hundreds of years ago, and the more recent ones have all been in captivity (as in new york, etc). the first ever (recorded) deadly mauling in new jersey occurred in 2014. there have been a few instances in tennessee as well.

comparatively speaking, the western side of the united states, and central canadian provinces, have a much higher risk of fatal bear encounters. central canada and the western US is much less populated (bar cities), more forested, and contains more threatening bears. the grizzly bear can reach heights up to 9 feet and have a bite force of 1,000 psi. they are also a little bolder than black bears, and bear spray can be ineffective on them.

the most recent cases of (wild) fatal bear attacks have occurred mostly in alaska, montana, alberta, saskatchewan, manitoba, wyoming, and colorado. the overwhelming majority of human victims were hiking or camping when the attacks occurred. bears as a whole tend to avoid towns and large groups of people. they know how to pick their battles.

attributed causes have varied. some attacks are defensive, some are predatory. bears do eat people. alive, in fact. that's what makes them a bigger threat than big cats- they don't kill their meals before they start eating. there was a recent black bear attack in arizona on a camping ground (which is what made the attack so bizarre) where a man was dragged away from his camper and eaten alive. it took several minutes of passive attacks to dissuade the bear before someone with a gun stepped in. but the man was already dead by then.

I've read cases of elderly women feeding bears on their rural properties and then being mauled. shocking. but almost all attacks happen rurally, in national parks, forests, etc. alaska seems to be the only place where morning joggers get mauled by bears but it's fucking alaska. what else would you expect from trying to urbanize alaska.

my boyfriend was telling me about the sankebetsu brown bear incident, which I find REALLY interesting because of the circumstances. took place over a few days, in a town (though newly established), and it killed nine people. super interesting I'd definitely recommend looking into it.

I hope you enjoyed this. I really don't care about anime discourse but I like reading about bear attacks.

source: wikipedia's list of north american fatal bear attacks. my boyfriend and I had a date last night and I read the list to him

thank you for this highlight of my day already