#summer reads 2022

[pokeberry5]

your tim is soooooooo beautiful i can’t stop looking at him 😍

do you have any good tim whump fic recs? like the classic comm cuts out when he’s in trouble or really anything

(thank you!! im glad u like my tim art)

(in reference to this, where i mentioned liking whump fics where tim ends up on the ropes alone and his comm cuts out)

i was digging through my reading history to try to find some recs and it seems??? i may have extrapolated fics based on what i wanted to read rip

i did still put some fic recs together! but these are slightly to the left of your original requests. i'm gonna put them in order of relevancy. broad warning to please read the tags on all of these

Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me In by nierembergia

tim's on the line with damian when suddenly a harmless-seeming interaction at a gala turns sinister (wip)

buy the ticket, take the ride

wherein tim is attempting to deal with things on his own after finding himself alone in vegas, at some point calls jason to "consult" him about blood spatters, and then has to hang up on him because he's getting shot at

the days of theft (no more) by SilverSkiesAtMidnight

gen omegaverse, jason takes tim and in the process snaps the bond between bruce and tim. including this one because the pack bond snapping between bruce and tim has, to me, the same emotional impact of a comm getting caught (wip)

Into the Brighter Night by shoalsea

the set up of this fic is tim manipulating the bats into following a plan he misrepresented and then purposefully going dark, although the majority of the fic deals with the interpersonal fallout of tim's actions (complete)

children of the stars by Scarlet_Ribbons

jason takes tim in because jack drake's a piece of shit and ends up doing his own growing in the process. not sure how to explain why i'm including this without spoiling it, but there is a Big Moment later in the fic that to me is equivalent to tim purposely cutting his comms off to deal with a situation himself (wip)

Call to a Lonely Earth by Drag0nst0rm

in the midst of brucequest, tim ends up on an earth where there are no longer any children and bruce has lost both his sons. i'm mostly including this one because i like it a lot, but—mild spoiler—tim does make a call explaining what he presents as a hopeless situation that he can't be saved from and then hangs up! (first fic is complete but sequel isn't)

also, while it doesn't quite have the same emotional force of what i was looking for, detective comics (1940) #698-99 is where i originally got the idea from and it does feature protective dick and alvin draper!

[nonasbirthday]

a couple years ago i had zero attention span, and i hadn't properly read a book in forever. the pandemic absolutely did not help, on account of i was working long hours & also dead inside. but in early 2021 i picked up TLT and it reignited my love of reading. and over this past year i finished 22 books :')

forever grateful to the lesbian space juggalos for resurrecting the ghost of my 12-year-old self, a nerd who had to be banned from reading books while walking between classes. (she wouldn't be very impressed by my 2023 book count, but she also had zero responsibilities and limited internet access, so. who cares.)

here's to a continued love of reading for all of us in 2024, and maybe some ATN teasers!

[krafterwrites]

I’ve finally done it. After two years, I finished reading the entirety of Archie Sonic

[xxxyzart]

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met.”

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

[tinogiehd]

i feel like i know that fic and i download all the ones i read so maybe…

please im begging you

[aceforwhatevenisthis]

the worst part of ant-man being my favorite superhero isn’t even that i only really got into hank pym’s ant-man

it’s that i only really like the EMH version of him

[xcziel]

if anyone has recs for 21+ bldrama, kdrama, or (bts-friendly) kpop discord servers that tolerate lurker-types and slow typers i'd appreciate a heads-up

[livvyofthelake]

to be fair o haven’t given him much opportunity but alex is not helping in the falling asleep war. why is my body incapable of fucking relaxing. i physically cannot un-tense myself rn and frankly it’s making me wish i was just dead. and if i don’t sleep now then i’ll get tired at work and come home and nap at 6pm. which will only make me not tired again when actual nighttime comes around and i won’t sleep AGAIN. like ok do i just kill my self or what

[aroaessidhe]

2022 reads // twitter thread    

How To Excavate A Heart

Jewish lesbian winter romcom

a girl still reeling from a bad breakup plans to spend her winter break focusing on her paleoichthyology internship

she can’t stop running into (literally, with a car) a girl after getting a dog-walking gig, & they have a winter romance

[elektramouthed]

 While I agree with Roberts that submissive-masochistic femininity was an overriding characteristic of Victorian heterosexual relationships, I contend that the construction of a submissive, feminine masochism was a reflection of a Victorian engagement with death, and, moreover, that Victorian society simultaneously reified and coped with death, by ‘othering’ it as feminine. Further to this I would argue that the ‘othering’ of death was internalized by middle-class Victorian women, and that this macabre psychic internalization contributed to the construction of a morbid female sexual subjectivity. Given these circumstances it would appear that the popularity of corsetry rested precisely on its propensity to sexualize the female body in a manner that reflected a particular and sinister historical moment, a moment in which the intersection of sexuality and morbidity coalesced.

Leigh Summers, from Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset

[vinmauro]

Steddie for the ship ask game! :)

ohhh kam ur trying my niceness 😔 (kidding!!)

1. i do love a good scene where someone realizes steve’s a good guy actually and tell him so

2. again jock/outcast vibes are immaculate i love them it’s such a stupid trope but i’m HERE

3. their potential is fun!! their growth as characters is fun!! i just really wish people loved steve who ship steddie :) and also i wish people loved eddie who ship steddie :)

send me a ship and i’ll tell you 3 things i like about them!!

[yourelosingains]

wait so there’s actually leaks already??

[humandisastersquad]

Forgot to refill my sleep meds before xmas so have been sleeping terribly lately but bringing back memories of staying up past like 2am nearly every night of the 2012-13 summer hols reading merlin fic to fill the gaping hole that fuckign finale left in me

[pinchraccoon]

I think I'm gonna write an actual like, real review of it, but here's my mini review of Pokemon Violet to get my thoughts summarized.

The latest entries to pokemon, while a bold step in a new direction, may be a step into Alaskan snow in flip-flops. The game has some great ideas and lofty ambitions, and for what it does accomplish, there's clearly a lot of fun to be had with the product that was delivered, however, the preparation given to bring these ideas into fruition was far under prioritized.

To speak kindly of the game before speaking ill, I have always, and will always, love pokemon. It's a series that is very near and dear to me, and there's a certain magic that comes with learning all about the new creatures that have been added to the growing roster of canonized monster designs I've come to love, especially on a semi-blind playthrough, the magic of learning about and hunting down as many new pokemon is unmatched. SV does deliver on this, as I feel that this generation has a series of lovely pokemon designs that I have fallen in love with in my short time with them. (Tinkaton, Revavroom, Ceruledge, Meowscarada, and Chi-Yu are all new favorites)

Additionally, the story of SV is quite well done, easily one of the best-executed stories in pokemon in a while, and while I don't think I'm comfortable calling it "better than" the story of BW/BW2, I feel that it's comparable in quality. Characters, themes, and plot points all feel surprisingly natural in a game that theoretically allows you to go off and challenge its many hurdles in any order, utilizing the scripted events that it does have cleverly, and to great effect. I particularly enjoyed the Team Star narrative, and how it takes the "evil team" formula that pokemon has had for a long time, and juxtaposes the idea of a group of bullies onto it, only to learn over time that they're just bullied people sticking together, and aren't bad, just misrepresented.

On the basis of the typical gameplay loop, SV delivers Very well. The incorporation of overworld encounters and optional trainer battles allows the player to feel free and uninhibited by the game itself, and free to engage with exactly as much content as they would like to, whether this be picking and choosing what pokemon to battle in the wild, or which trainers if any, they feel the need to battle. SV's design philosophy seems to be prioritizing freedom as much as possible, while also meaningfully rewarding progression, and I feel that the game flow comes off as organic.

This is to say, that this game has more team-building potential out of the gate than just about any other pokemon game, with countless pokemon accessible to the player even moments from starting the game, appealing to collection freaks and competitive fans alike.

Then, what's the problem?

In short, the game is unfinished. The game, at launch, would routinely dip to what I could ascertain to be 12-17 FPS regularly, and while steps have been taken already to make the drops in framerate far less drastic, the time to do that incredibly important work is before release, not after. The framerate, the chief among issues, and generally its lack of optimization for switch hardware, sometimes spoils the other wonderful parts of the game. Finding pokemon is less intriguing when extreme pop-in only allows you to look at pokemon less than 20 feet away from you, and somewhat harms the immersion of the experience. And while updated models and style of the pokemon have been made, and they're quite impressive, it's hard to say that the pokemon "look good" when after 4 appear on screen at once, or even two pokemon with some attacks, their frames drop far below what they should.

Additionally, while this game loads quickly traveling between areas, smaller, more subtle, but similarly important loading times feel far, far too long. The boxes take far too long to load the images of your pokemon in each individual box, which somewhat harms the collection fantasy, and upon starting a battle with a wild pokemon, their "low poly open world" model will still be loaded long into the first turn. Additionally, menuing remains rather clunky and sluggish, which quickly becomes annoying when things like Wonder Trade or other such "quick" menuing activities take a minimum of 45 seconds due to their lack of optimization.

The issues I'm listing sound comparatively minor, however, in an experience as dependent on a lack of obstruction as SV are clearly trying to be, the failure to deliver on a product that runs consistently and reasonably is a major slight against it.

These issues are not deliberate design choices that simply do not work, these larger issues are a product of the dev teams' inability to put out the product that wouldn't have these problems, and the issues with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are by and large issues with management, not the dev team themselves. The worrying pace at which Pokemon games are released, especially considering that SV is not even our first major open-world Pokemon release this year, is clearly harming Game Freak's ability to provide a product that will meet the expectations of both fans AND the artists themselves.

SV is in many ways, an extremely fun game that has been weighed down by the weight of the industry, and as much as I loved the time and fun that I had with it, its issues cannot be overlooked. I can't say that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, in their current state, are "good" games. Violet is a game that I enjoyed, it's a game that perhaps will be good in the future following patches and performance updates, but at current, the development issues that are so apparent and the clear lack of optimization for switch hardware made by these issues genuinely harm my perception of the game quite a bit.

Is it fun? Yeah. Is it good? No.

[philologique]

anyway it’s a new year (2023! 17 times 7 times 17!!) and i’m hoping to make it through more actual books. i’d love any recs to combat the single biggest reading slump i’ve ever experienced