MCYT Battleship!

Mar. 26th, 2026 10:20 am
knave_of_swords: Kukuri looking happy (kukuri)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
I didn't write or draw anything for MCYT Battleship this year, but I did throw in some prompts, and received some lovely artwork!

Prompts I made in the all ages collection:
Hermitcraft SMP
Solo: Decked Out 2 (Hermitcraft)
Solo: Decked Out 3 (Hermitcraft)
Solo: Deepfrost Citadel (Hermitcraft)
Gift Medium: Art
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Freeforms: a brief respite, Abandoned Structures, Architectural Horror, Bioluminescence, Card Games, Caves, Corruption, Cursed forest, Decay, eclipse, environmental horror, Fog, Mazes and Labyrinths, Overgrown, rainy day, spire, Tarot, Treasure Hunting
I would love any sort of art of Decked Out 2 or 3, or Deepfrost Citadel! Feel free to include any Hermitcraft characters if you would like, especially Tango or Etho or Pearl.
 
For Decked Out 3, I would love to see your interpretations of what various areas might look like based on Tango's descriptions so far! Don't worry about being accurate or not to what he ends up building.
 
For Decked Out 2, my favorite level is The Black Mines (level 3), but honestly I love all the levels, they're all great.
 
DNW: Iskall, any / ships
 
 
Hermitcraft SMP
GeminiTay/PearlescentMoon (Hermitcraft)
GeminiTay/ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
PearlescentMoon/ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
Solo: GeminiTay (Hermitcraft)
Solo: Pearlescentmoon (Hermitcraft)
Solo: ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
Gift Medium: Art
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Freeforms: Banter, Caves, Cherry Blossoms, Clouds, Confessions, Crushes, farming, Fishing, Gift Giving, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Holding Hands, lantern festival, Late Night Conversations, Laughter, pastel colors, rainy day, Slice of Life, Sparring, Sunrise/Sunset, Tarot
I've seen seasons 8 and 9, and I'm currently up to date on season 11. I've been working on season 10 but mainly from Pearl's perspective right now, but I don't mind any potential spoilers.
 
DNW: Aro or ace characters in / relationships, multiplicity/plurality, neopronouns, selkies, mermaids, soulmates, requested characters identifying as male, animal/creature/mob hybrid characters, soulmates, requested characters in unrequested / ships, Iskall

Prompts I put in the 18+ collection:
Video Blogging RPF
GeminiTay/Ethoslab (VBRPF)
GeminiTay/Grian (VBRPF)
GeminiTay/jojosolos (VBRPF)
GeminiTay/LDShadowLady (VBRPF)
GeminiTay/PearlescentMoon (VBRPF)
GeminiTay/ZombieCleo (VBRPF)
Gift Medium: Fic
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Ratings: Explicit, General Audiences
Freeforms: Alcohol, au - time loop, Cheating/Infidelity, Confessions, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Enthusiastic Consent, Getting Together, Inconvenient Arousal, Late Night Conversations, Secret Relationship, Sexting, Social Media, Vulnerability, Yearning
DNW: Aro or ace characters in / relationships, characters having neurodivergent or transgender identities that they don't have in real life (lesbian/bi/gay/etc is fine), multiplicity/plurality, unrequested alternate universe settings or worlds that couldn't be real*, babies (pregnancy is fine), gore, cannibalism, vore, grief/mourning, graphic homophobia (ie slurs, bigotry motivated violence, conversion therapy), any requested characters or hermitcraft members being homophobic or transphobic, recreational drug use, mpreg, soulmates, genderbending
 
*"Canon divergence" sort of AUs where reality happened a little differently is fine, I just don't want AUs that change the setting out of the real world unless I specifically prompt for something like that
 
Regarding existing partners: I am fine with however you would like to deal with this! Cheating is fine, previous divorce or breakup is fine, polyamory is fine, the partner never existing at all or just being a friend is fine. Feel free to not even mention it if you don't want to.
 
Prompts:
- Okay I know I basically dnw non-irl settings, but I think the time loop tag could be so good! I would still want it to be basically just reality with a time loop, though-- feel free to not even explain the time loop if you don't want to. Someone is looping real life until they confess, or something, maybe?
- Okay and one more non-irl setting prompt: What if the content creators woke up in the Minecraft world unexpectedly and literally became their characters? Like a Log Horizon or Sword Art Online sort of situation where they're stuck in the game world. I would love anything like this, especially if it dealt with exploring what exactly happened to cause this, missing friends and family left behind, what dying and respawning feels like to someone who isn't used to it, etc.
- Hermitcraft charity events! Feel free to make up your own one from the future, or use anything that's happened in past charity events.
- Any irl events you want to draw from that any of the requested characters participated in are fine! Like the recent ski trip that Gem and Grian went on, for instance.
- I love RPF where the public finds out about the relationship! In this scenario, I prefer for there not to be cheating or infidelity, but it isn't a hard DNW. But I love like, imagined social media feeds exploding and reactions upon finding out that their MCYT CCs are dating each other irl.
- Similarly, the hermits finding out that Gem is dating someone else in MCYT! Especially if it's another hermit.
 
 
Hermitcraft SMP
BdoubleO100 & Ethoslab (Hermitcraft)
Ethoslab/GeminiTay (Hermitcraft)
GeminiTay & Pearlescentmoon (Hermitcraft)
GeminiTay & ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
GeminiTay/PearlescentMoon (Hermitcraft)
PearlescentMoon & TangoTek (Hermitcraft)
Pearlescentmoon & ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
PearlescentMoon/ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
Gift Medium: Fic
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Ratings: Explicit, General Audiences
Freeforms: Alcohol, Attempted Murder, au - time loop, Bickering, Confessions, environmental horror, farming, Glitched mechanics, Immortality, Late Night Conversations, Mazes and Labyrinths, Only One Bed, Pirates, Redstone Mechanics, Respawn Mechanics, Stargazing, Temporary Character Death, Vulnerability, Worldbuilding
These are all relationships that I like! I'm marking explicit but not putting any explicit tags in, because I also put in a lot of & relationships, but feel free to mix and match with the explicit request I'm going to add right after this!
 
 
I've seen seasons 8 and 9, I'm caught up with 11, and I've been watching season 10 and don't mind spoilers but I'm only about one third through just Pearl's season 10.
 
DNW: Aro or ace characters in / relationships, permanent amputation (temporary, such as until the next death, is fine), gore, vore, cannibalism, eye injury/removal, genderbending, graphic homophobia (ie slurs, bigotry motivated violence, conversion therapy), hypnosis, multiplicity/plurality, selkies, merpeople, , somnophilia, sounding, sex work

Hermitcraft SMP
Ethoslab/GeminiTay (Hermitcraft)
GeminiTay/PearlescentMoon (Hermitcraft)
PearlescentMoon/ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
Gift Medium: Fic
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Ratings: Explicit, General Audiences
Freeforms: Alcohol, Aphrodisiacs, bed sharing, Clothed Sex, Cunnilingus, Denial of Feelings, Enthusiastic Consent, Established Relationship, Fuck Or Die, Getting Together, Hand Kisses, Neediness, Only One Bed, Pinned against wall, Reunions, Scars, Stargazing, Under-negotiated Kink, Unexpected Mercy, Yearning
 
These are all relationships that I like! These are mostly explicit and shippy, but feel free to mix and match tags with the other request I made that has & ships also attached to it!
 
 
I've seen seasons 8 and 9, I'm caught up with 11, and I've been watching season 10 and don't mind spoilers but I'm only about one third through just Pearl's season 10.
 
 
DNW: Aro or ace characters in / relationships, permanent amputation (temporary, such as until the next death, is fine), gore, vore, cannibalism, eye injury/removal, genderbending, graphic homophobia (ie slurs, bigotry motivated violence, conversion therapy), hypnosis, multiplicity/plurality, selkies, merpeople, somnophilia, sounding, sex work


One overlapping prompt that I added to both sides:
Life Series | 3rd Life SMP Series, Hermitcraft SMP
Solo: BDoubleO100 (Hermitcraft)
Solo: BdoubleO100 (Life Series)
Solo: Ethoslab (Hermitcraft)
Solo: Ethoslab (Life Series)
Solo: GeminiTay (Hermitcraft)
Solo: GeminiTay (Life Series)
Solo: GoodTimesWithScar (Hermitcraft)
Solo: GoodTimesWithScar (Life Series)
Solo: Grian (Life Series)
Solo: LDShadowLady (Life Series)
Solo: Pearlescentmoon (Hermitcraft)
Solo: PearlescentMoon (Life Series)
Solo: TangoTek (Hermitcraft)
Solo: ZombieCleo (Hermitcraft)
Solo: ZombieCleo (Life Series)
Gift Medium: Art
Gift Medium: Fic
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Freeforms: AU - Cultivation Setting
Cultivation AU!!!! I would love to see you make Hermitcraft or the Life Series into a wuxia or xianxia setting with cultivation. Feel free to go all out! Golden cores, flying swords, building and/or redstone as cultivation, reincarnation, however you want to do it! Especially if you incorporate minecraft-y or CC things, like having the youtube audience be their disciples or something.
 
 
Feel free to just rewrite canon events as being in a cultivation AU, I would love anything like that, or if you want to make a new story in a cultivation world! If you want to take inspiration from existing cultivation stories, feel free! I particularly imagine Hermitcraft as being a SVSSS-esque system, where they're either a coalition of sects or one giant sect, and each Hermit is either a sect leader or shizun in that sect.
 
 
Ships I like, you don't have to include of course, but if you want to write something shippy or with multiple characters (I couldn't fit all of them into the tag box so I didn't put any in there):
- Pearl&/Cleo
- Pearl&/Gem
- Pearl&/Tango
- Gem&/Cleo
- Etho&/Gem
- Scar&/Grian
- Etho&/Bdubs
- Etho&/Cleo
- Lizzie&/Cleo
- Pearl & Etho & Tango
- Bdubd & Tango
- Tango & Zedaph
- Scar & Bdubs
- Grian & Mumbo
 
 
DNW heavy angst, I'd like something more light hearted here, but light angst is fine especially for the Life Series. Regarding MCD, I'm fine with final deaths in the Life Series if it's clear that the 'death' is more of just being barred from entering the world again, but the character still 'lives' outside the bounds of that world. Like if the Life Series is a realm they travel to in order to have a fun death game, and dying on red just means they lose the game but don't die for real outside of that realm.

And I got two lovely pieces of art for the art prompts I put into the all ages collection!:

Pearl/Gem, Moonlight Dockside

s9 Gem, a nice night

MCYT & Minecraft

Mar. 25th, 2026 07:06 pm
knave_of_swords: BdoubleO100's minecraft skin's face, which is a smiling face with big eyes and a big grin (bdubs)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
I finished watching Pearl's Hermitcraft season 10! It was so much fun. I think she's officially become my favorite hermit, I love her building style and find her so inspiring for my own creativity and ideas. I've started Gem's season 10 now! I'm planning on watching hers all the way through (or nearly so; I skipped her first two episodes because super early game is just less interesting for me to watch), but I think the only other hermit that I'll watch all the way through their season 10 will be Bdubs. I want to watch Scar's build videos, but I'm less interested in permit office/poe poe shenanigans, for instance. 

I also recently tried playing Minecraft again myself! I actually ended up getting really frustrated, due to the heightened survival aspects in the early game. It felt like the survival parts were getting in the way of me building and creating my ideas. So I think I'm going to try creative mode? Creative mode used to be something I low key hated to play because it sucked all of the fun out of it for me because what I was playing for was the survival and mining aspects. And, I definitely still love those aspects of the game! But when I want to build, they get in the way. So I think I'm going to start a creative large biomes world and build whatever I want! I'm even thinking about figuring out how to use World Edit to make texturing large areas and creating terrain more easy for me. And then while I'm at it, I might as well also install Replay Mod so I can make videos out of my build projects, something I tried to give up the idea of doing, but now that I'm imagining doing creative mode, it sounds exciting and fun rather than something dreadful. 

Currently I've only really got two build ideas: an ivory magic wizard tower (in a forest?), and a pirate kingdom with a lagoon (on an island?). But I think that I could definitely build off of both of those ideas in a lot of different ways! 

I also put in some prompts for the MCYT Battleship event! And even received some gifts, which will reveal soon! But I'll do that in its own separate post once the collection gets unveiled. 

(no subject)

Mar. 24th, 2026 07:04 pm
blotthis: (Default)
[personal profile] blotthis
Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (for [personal profile] genarti ) is the second book I started in 2023 I finished last month! Like Middlemarch, I liked the book very much, and I was surprised by the ending. 

In this case, it's because I got got by the sheer amount of backmatter! I thought I had about half the book left... no. Around 60 pages. Idiot. It's likely, though, if I had finished it in 2023, I wouldn't have written it up, so who's winning NOW??? 

I largely found the book delightful. I found Sheldrake particularly good at structure, a skill I desperately wish more science writers had, and which makes him very successful at writing science. He was able to, particularly chapter by chapter, structure the book around science-as-she-is-lived, following the complications, inversions, changes, misses, and upsets that characterize close attention to the study of any subject. It was such a pleasure to follow him down a line of thought and study, and then have him raise a question that undercut it, introduce a new study that changed the thinking, or reveal a limitation in the study or studies that I wouldn't have thought to consider. His understanding of understanding as a not just a constantly-changing, often-wrong activity, but of the drama of that activity, and that that drama is best relayed through making the reader re-experience of it... I loved it every time, from his discussion of how it's completely impossible to study mycorrhizal networks in a lab (not enough variables) or in the field (too many variables) to his clear impatience with the notion of tree "nurseries," which to him seems embarrassingly forgetful of that fungi are also living organisms with needs, like a plant-world version of androcentrism.

Many of my delights in the book were also in his attention to metaphor, which also serves him extremely well as a science writer and history-of-science writer. From the beginning, he pays close attention to how the metaphors used to describe fungi affect how they were seen and studied, from the conception of a "parasitic" partner in lichens, to the idea of symbiosis, to the idea of networks. He interrogates the terms used by contemporary scientists, such as "market" or "supply and demand," and also of the power of inverting expected metaphors, like when he calls a company that makes building material out of mycelium "the industrial equivalent of a Macrotermes termite mound," asks if yeasts domesticated US, or points out that the existence of in-plant fungi should trouble our understanding of what an individual plant is, or if one exists. Meanwhile, he is fully aware--and seems thrilled by--that it is impossible to do the work of science without metaphors. That we come to understanding via comparison doesn't seem to be a drawback, for Sheldrake... His enthusiasm for fungi, and for the study of fungi, seems only deepened by his sense that our understanding will be in constant revision. 

Sheldrake, in fact, so communicates his enthusiasms that when, at the end of the book, he states that he plans to make a beer out of pulping one of copies of the book (fermentation) and growing oysters on another, it's barely even a surprise. Of course he does. (And, per his Instagram, did.) This kind of excitement made him an excellent guy to spend time with, although I think it may have contributed to my least favorite parts of the book. There are moments where Sheldrake indulges, it seems to me, in a kind of grandiosity, most commonly at the beginning and endings of chapters. It's not, so much, that I don't think the subject deserves grandiosity, but that it sometimes seemed attached to personal anecdote, or taped onto a chapter to remind the reader there was a reason to keep reading about mushrooms. I don't know if it was an authorial choice or an editorial one, but it frequently made me roll my eyes. Please, sir! I am bought in! That said, it could be that after reading it once, I'd roll my eyes less, and just think happily to myself, Yes that's rightHow will the study of fungi expand our understanding of ourselves????? 

Finally, a few favorite factoids: 
  • Some lichens don't live on anything. They just blow around, like symbiotic tumbleweed
  • PENICILLIN WAS CROWDSOURCED
  • when fungi (Ophiocordyceps) take over ants it becomes up to forty percent of the ant's biomass BUT ISN'T IN THEIR BRAIN 

Ok I can't leave it there. Too horrible. 

I really liked the book, and I was honestly disappointed when I realized my foolishness about backmatter. More please!

(no subject)

Mar. 21st, 2026 08:46 pm
blotthis: (Default)
[personal profile] blotthis
Ok, about three weeks later than I wanted to get to this, heeeeere's Middlemarch! For [personal profile] queenlua  and [personal profile] recognito , per this post, if you reasonably don't know what I'm talking about. (In my defense, I was proofing a book, and every time I had spare language-brain, I felt like I had to go make sure no words had been misspelled.)

First, a confession. I did not read all of Middlemarch last month. I didn't even read all of it this year. I started it in 2023, took about got 60% of the way through, and then put it away. Until this past month. I read the chapter summaries of the book I was on (Book 5 of 8) on Sparknotes, reviewed my chat comments from 2023, and decided that would suffice.

So, I can't really talk about the book as a book-shaped thing. Not really. What can I say... 

Did any of you ever run into a book--the name of which escapes me--that was a set of joke summaries of famous books? The Ulysses one was the shortest: "June 16 came, and went, in Dublin." It's not that funny, but I kept thinking that one summary of Middlemarch, as true as anything else, might be, "Some years came, and went, in Middlemarch."

It's a bad summary, of course, but it at least hints at the scope of the novel... Well. Arguably. There aren't that many working class or poor people in Middlemarch. "Some years came, and went, in Middlemarch, where several upper class families with different fortunes-------------"

Drags hands down my face. I just checked my trusty notes where normally I have some sort of review to use as crib notes, and what did past blotthis write? "good book." Thanks, buddy. Okay. In the interest of writing this up at all, have some messages copied from DMs I sent people while reading. Unless indicated, it's just me babbling:I'm losing my mind george is so excellently filleting the poor the rich the religious the technocrat and the technophobe in TWO PARAGRAPHS ABOUT ATTITUDES ABOUT TRAINS. )

Sighs. I really, really liked it. As you can see, I particularly lost my mind over the Lydgates, a toxic marriage so bad it made me want to strip my skin off instead of chanting sexy divorce! like a little goblin and over the homosocially-charged scene between Rosamund and Dorothea. Every day I am praying to the Yuletide gods that someone will write the version where they make sexy gay mistakes. For me. I also loved Fred and Mary, Mr. Featherstone, and, god, I loved reading about Bulstrode from Eliot's pen. 

I am honestly still agog at both Eliot's powers of observation and at her power to transmit that observation. I saw (but didn't read) some article about how it's simply not possible to write in this style of aphoristic-all-seeing-judgement-cum-fairness anymore, and I don't know if I believe it, but I do think Eliot is on some dope shit. I certainly don't know anyone else who writes like this. (It did make me feel like I needed to go read some Tolstoy?? Is this two cakes????)

I enjoy Austen best when she's making her narrator a coy little bitch to her characters, and Eliot somehow is a coy little bitch to all her characters by never doing that. Or almost never. I don't know. I'd have to reread it, or at least write out all my highlights by hand to get a handle on it. Either'd be a worthwhile project, for sure, but neither are in my near future... Anyway. She's got a phenomenal control of tone and POV, I can tell you that. 

I'm also still stunned at how fucking gripped I was by the ending arcs of the novel. I knew some stuff from summaries, but knowing where the Lydgates end up and what Dorothea chooses to do simply does not do justice to the intensity of those last 100 something pages. I still don't know how she did it. I mean, several dark nights of the soul in a row, but to have those Dark Nights feel like, Yes. This is where this was all heading. 600 pages ago. For like six different characters. Insane shit. 

The very ending is funny, because Eliot tries to suggest that Dorothea is the book's main character? Or something? Which. Well. Okay. The comparison I made above to TNY is in the way The New Yorker Story gives you a character, lets you watch them make decisions, and then invites you to judge them. There's some of that, in Eliot. I mean, Eliot also invites you to consider how you judge them, as well as tells you about why you might judge them, etc., etc., so it's not like they're that similar in form, but there certainly is an overlapping interest in the Foibles of the Upper-Middle Class and How They Have or Don't Have Dark Nights of the Soul. Anyway. The end of Middlemarch is NOT the ending of a New Yorker Story. She will be telling you some more things you should think about. It's not nearly as strong--to my mind--as the rest of the ending, but I can forgive it, given how good the rest of the book is.

It's worth noting, if you are inspired to read it, that Eliot's occasionally Upper Middle Class English weird about Jewish people. (Note: Gogol kindly corrected me here, particularly re: Eliot's Orientalist-ish attitudes not being exactly of her time. Thank you, Gogol. I know so very little of the English and it's silly to have guessed lololol) Not the worst, but Becca let me know that Daniel Deronda is about how hard it is to be hot Jew, and that tracks. And is kind of embarrassing. George... C'mon. C'mon.

Anyway. Great fucking book. One of my favorites of the year so far, for sure. 

(no subject)

Mar. 21st, 2026 10:22 am
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
[personal profile] skygiants
I've seen two Boston Ballets in relatively quick succession over the past month, both combo programs featuring two pieces; the first was "The Rite of Spring" (Elo's, not Nijinsky's) paired with Pite's "The Seasons' Canon," and the second was a premiere, Stromile's "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window," paired with Ashton's "The [Midsummer Night's] Dream."

Breaking with the actual curation of the productions, I'm going to talk about "The Rite of Spring" and "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window" together because they both came first in their productions, they had kind of similar vibes, and I experienced similar feelings of mild disappointment about both of them that were not technically the fault of the productions. I was really excited about "The Rite of Spring" because I wanted to see some ballet dancers do a dramatic ritual sacrifice, and I was really excited about "The Leisurely Installation of a New Window" because I wanted to see some ballet dancers slowly install a window. Instead, both of these pieces were kind of abstract explorations through dance of the Relationship between the Individual and Society, and I think both would have been enjoyable for fifteen minutes but ran a bit long at half an hour.

The description for "Window" in the playbill reads:

Eighteen dancers inhabit the work through distinct but interdependent roles. The Seeker stands close to tradition, moving with discipline and clarity. The People operate within shared systems, attentive to both order and its quiet tensions. The Reformers introduce disruption, not as spectacle, but as pressure applied from within.

This did help me understand better what was going on in the dance, as the Seeker stalked around holding a book and then portentously passed it off to some dueting Reformers, but also made it feel a bit like a LARP that I was not participating in. On the other hand Reeves Gabriel of The Cure was There and Participating in Ballet Music (and every bit of marketing wanted you to know that Reeves Gabriel Of The Cure was There and Participating in Ballet Music) and occasionally the music would get very thrillingly electric guitar and you'd be like "Hello, Reeves Gabriel of The Cure!" So it's not that I didn't have a fine time, I just would have been okay with somewhat less of that time.

However, after these very mildly disappointing openers, I loved both "The Seasons' Canon" and "The Dream" very much! The Seasons' Canon is, justifiably, a known Boston Ballet showstopper -- a huge piece with a huge cast, and as you guys know I often have trouble with a piece that is not trying to tell me a story but this piece is truly just Humans Make Big Shapes and it's riveting. Could not take my eyes off it. The trailer here gives a bit of a sense but of course is not that much like seeing it Actually On Stage, but it does let you see one of the things I found most striking about the piece which is how extremely non-gendered it is -- everyone on that stage is dressed identically in pants and nude tank that makes them look topless, the whole corps looks like one and moves like one and there is nothing to distract you from that. Really, really cool experience.

And "The Dream" -- look, I'm a simple soul, and what I have discovered is that I love Ashton's silly panto-esque ballets. They are fun and they are funny and I love it when people get to be funny in dance! Dance jokes are good actually! Titania ballet-hopping her way towards Bottom in a way that manages to be simultaneously fairy-like and hilariously sultry, the arguing lovers constantly picking each other up and pirouetting a partner firmly Away from them Thank You, the rude mechanicals!! we wanted more rude mechanicals but I was so glad we got what we got. A+ Midsummer Night's Dream, would see again.

(no subject)

Mar. 18th, 2026 10:50 pm
skygiants: Nellie Bly walking a tightrope among the stars (bravely trotted)
[personal profile] skygiants
Because Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!

The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.

Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.

Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!

It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.

Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

knave_of_swords: (Default)
[personal profile] knave_of_swords
 


I decided to finally DNF this one, at about 55% of the way through. It was just getting too repetitive, and the next two chapters explicitly was about how to build a 'truthseeking pod' or something and I was just done. 

There are a lot of good ideas here, but I'm not really someone who needs to hear most of them. Most of the lessons talked about in the book are things that my parents already taught me, or that I learned through my own experience. As someone who has examined the foundation of nearly every belief that I had, and then decided that those beliefs were based on falsehoods— as someone who grew up in mormonism, confronted the evidence that mormonism was not true, and rejected mormonism as a result— very little of what this book talks about is new to me. The ideas are mostly sound, to be sure, but they aren’t useful or helpful to me because I’ve already internalized them to the degree that I’m aware of them affecting my decision making. I won’t say I’m perfect at it, but the goal of the book seems largely to call attention to irrational decision processes and what causes them, because awareness of the problem helps in fixing the problem. I’m already aware, and have in fact already made some very difficult decisions in favor of truth seeking. It's a continuous process, but this book is aimed more towards 'beginners' in this area, which I am not. 
 
It's also more aimed at business people and feels more self-helpy than I prefer. This book did make me think about some things, but as I said above, it mostly told me things that I already was aware of. I did like the idea of explicitly treating decisions as bets on probabilities. 
 
Honestly what compelled me the most was the fleeting bits of discussion about poker strategy; this book has piqued my interest in poker and now I want to learn how to play. It's not a poker book, to be clear, that was just what ended up being the most interesting part to me. 
 
I don't disagree with most things this book says, but it just felt very basic to me. Maybe there's some CEO out there who really needs to hear that sometimes you get lucky without doing anything to deserve it, or that you can get a negative outcome without doing anything wrong, but I for one learned those things from my parents long ago. I'm glad that this book exists for the people who need to learn from it; I'm just not one of those people. 

Would I recommend this book? Maybe to an aspiring CEO who never learned how to be introspective. I think most people, though, will get about as much out of the book as they would get out of a short summary of it.

Unfortunately, not an auspicious start to my audiobook journey. Now I need to figure out what to listen to on my work commute instead...

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